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UC Berkeley students held a second teach-in on Friday, protesting budget cuts, staff reductions and the increasing dependence of public education on corporate funds.

About three dozen students gathered in Tolman Hall’s Education and Psychology Library for an action on the University of California budget crisis, with Anthropology Professor Laura Nader providing the keynote address.

The turnout was smaller and the event shorter than the Oct. 9 all-night event at the Kroeber Hall Anthropology Library, perhaps because one of the key reasons for the teach-in had been resolved, at least for the moment.

Thanks to gifts from alumni and parents of current students, the university has promised to restore normal library hours after cutbacks and weekend closings had been implemented as a cost-cutting measure in response to the state budget crisis.

UC’s Board of Regents will vote in November on a proposed 32 percent fee increase for students, which would bring annual fees for students to more than $10,000 for the first time in the university’s history.

Nader, now in her 49th year of teaching at UC Berkeley, urged the student activists to be patient—“Americans are used to making these marches and strikes and thinking doing it once will accomplish the result,” she said—and to recognize that the struggle is part of a larger fight to determine “whether we are to be a plutocracy or a democracy.”

Nader reminded the students that it was alumni and not the university and its administrators who had given the funds to allow the libraries to maintain normal hours, adding, “Thank goodness we have some alums who have their priorities straight.”

Nader put the crisis of the university into a larger context. College education is considered a right in many nations, but, she said, “not here, in the richest country in the world, a country which is spending trillions on war, and not a defensive war. And look at the billions we are spending in California on prisons.”

One possible tactic to protest the fee increases she raised drew applause from the students: “Imagine if everyone started a boycott.”

She also criticized the university’s football program and intercollegiate sports in general, which she said had amassed a $158 million debt, “as far as we can determine from the numbers.”

She urged the university to follow the example of Robert Maynard Hutchins, who abolished intercollegiate athletics during his tenure at the University of Chicago. Nader said half of UC Berkeley’s football players fail to graduate.

The anthropologist also decried the diminishing role of the Academic Senate in campus decisions, recalling that when she joined the university in 1960, “you could not hold classes when the Academic Senate was meeting.”

She also urged alumni to organize more effectively on behalf of the school, citing the example of Yale alumni who have been organizing an alternative alumni association because the existing association “is now under the administration.”

“There is also the problem of words and deeds,” she said. “I was raised in a house where words and deeds had to go together. But now we live in a world where people say ‘Hope, hope; change, change’ and think they’ve got it done. And the people most susceptible to this are college graduates.”

“As a first year graduate student, you’re pretty much on your own for funding,” he said, explaining that grants and other resources become more available in later years of study. “I took out a loan to pay for my fees this year, and now it looks like I’ll have to take out another one. And even if you’re well off, the general character of the university is being endangered by increasing privatization.”

Desai said he and other organizers “believe that education should be a social right, and access shouldn’t be limited to people who can afford it.”

Dan Nemser, a sixth-year graduate student in Spanish, agreed.

“I was inspired by the success of the Sept. 24 march and rally to continue with direct action in support of public access to education,” he said, referring to demonstration that brought more than 5,000 students, faculty and campus workers to Sproul Plaza for the largest campus protest since the Vietnam War.

Nemser said students also want “to shine a light on the way the Berkeley administration and the university’s Office of the President is handling the crisis. Professor Meister’s report is a direct indictment of the way (UC President Mark) Yudof is mishandling university finances.”

Robert Meister, president of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, is the author of “They Pledged Your Tuition to Wall Street,” a 12-page report which alleges that regents are hiking fees specifically to raise the ratings on UC bond issues and to bankroll the system’s extensive building program.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson today granted a defense motion to move former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle’s murder trial away from the county because of the extensive publicity his case has received.

Mehserle, who is free on $3 million bail, is charged with murder for the shooting death of unarmed passenger Oscar Grant III, 22, at the Fruitvale station in Oakland early New Year’s Day after he and other officers were called to the station in response to reports of a fight on a train.

Mehserle’s lawyer, Michael Rains, admitted during Mehserle’s preliminary hearing in June that Mehserle killed Grant but claimed that it was “a tragic accident” because Mehserle meant to use his Taser device on Grant and fired his gun by mistake.

Rains told Jacobson at a hearing on the defense’s change of venue motion last week that if Mehserle’s trial isn’t moved out of Alameda County because of all the pretrial publicity it has received, “justice won’t be done.”

But prosecutor David Stein said the defense’s change of venue motion was “premature, unwarranted and unjustified” and said a survey by jury experts hired by the defense that supports moving the trial was “neither credible or reliable."

With the battle over West Berkeley zoning nearing an end, planning commissioners Wednesday night focused on the list of uses that would be allowed in areas where they had been previously barred. Acting under orders from the City Council majority, the commission has been hammering out a list of uses and definitions which could change the face of the city’s only haven for industry, manufacturing and artisans.

The goal of the council is to make West Berkeley a friendlier place for startup companies created to develop new technology patented by researchers at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“The manufacturing base of the future is going to depend a lot on the technology now being developed,” said Michael Caplan, the city’s economic development manager. “We want to capture some of that so they don’t leapfrog out of the community, especially in the area of green technology.”

While the city is banking on capitalizing on the green revolution in environmentally friendly products promised by the university, many of West Berkeley’s existing companies and artists fear that a land boom generated by new ordinances could drive them out of the city.

The debate pits landowners, developers and some business owners against members of West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies (WEBAIC), which represents many existing firms, coops and West Berkeley artists.

Planning commissioners appear split along the usual lines that have formed on development issues, with the commission majority pitted against Gene Poschman and Patti Dacey, two of only three of the nine commissioners who haven’t derived their livelihoods from the development sector.

“We’re not acting as a planning commission but as a economic development commission,” Poschman told his colleagues.

“I feel like I’m operating in the dark,” said Dacey, who feared the changes would set off a “and bonanza” in West Berkeley.

But chair David Stoloff said the proposed changes “represent an opportunity that we don’t want to let slip through our fingers.”

At issue Wednesday were proposed a zoning ordinance that would change uses in areas zoned for manufacturing, warehouses, wholesale and recycling which are currently restricted to land zoned for manufacturing and light industry.

The proposed changes would allow retailers who sell by phone, catalog or online, product development firms and companies specializing in solar-generated electricity or water heating and energy conservation to operate in the previously restricted zoning areas.

Another proposed new category, companies conducting research in physical engineering and the life sciences, would not be allowed in the protected zones.

The changes would also ease the permit processes for the changed uses, with staff-issued certificates or administrative use permits for companies occupying smaller spaces and full use permits, which require a public hearing before the Zoning Adjustments Board, only for the largest operations.

The proposed changes were developed by Alex Amoroso, a city staff planner, working with inputs from the commission and from meetings with a series of West Berkeley stakeholder groups.

Commissioners decided to devote their first November meeting to a four-hour session with all the stakeholders, which will follow their Oct. 28 meeting devoted to fine-tuning a new master use permit process that would allow incremental development of larger West Berkeley sites.

Wednesday night, as with all the previous meetings featuring West Berkeley, drew a large turnout, with the majority of the audience drawn from the ranks of WEBAIC and its allies.

Also on hand were several developers and their representatives. James Madsen of Orton Development, the new owners of the Flint Ink property, said that “while we certainly respect the idea of protected spaces, we also see a lot of unemployment,” and said that a balance between protection and the need for jobs would create a more vibrant local economy.

“Get a grip, folks,” said Darrell DeTienne, representing landowner Doug Herst, in urging the commission to combine research and development and product development into a single category.

“We have to have a much more dynamic approach if we are going to bring manufacturing in,” said Steven Goldin, a West Berkeley manufacturer and landowner.

But the voices from the other side have been more numerous.

John Curl, one of the founders of WEBAIC, urged commissioners to go slow. “Wait and deal with the whole picture, or it will lead you to conclusions that are not good for West Berkeley,” he said. And no discussions could be complete, he said, without understanding the full implications of the master use permit (MUP) revisions.

Rick Auerbach, WEBAIC’s spokesperson, said commissioners were in danger of subverting the intent of the West Berkeley Plan.

Auerbach said that a UC Berkeley had projected a maximum need of 2.5 million square feet for new industries, a figure he said could be easily accommodated within the six MUP sites originally proposed by the city and existing zoning.

“A lot of land in West Berkeley is not protected, and a lot of space never was protected. You don’t have to open up protected space to accommodate what you want,” he said.

The ferry is coming to Berkeley. WETA—the Water Emergency Transportation Authority—gave planning commissioners a Wednesday night update on its plans to build a new ferry terminal just south of the fishing pier at the Berkeley Marina.

But the commission had questions, and by the time the meeting ended, the regional transit agency still hadn’t won the panel’s imprimatur for the service it hopes will carry 1,716 riders a day between Berkeley and San Francisco.

“I would like to hold this over until Oct. 28 because there seem to be some concerns’” said commission chair David Stoloff.

WETA will also be airing its plans before the City Council Nov. 17, though the agency has said it retains the final say, and not the city. The service could go on line as early as the end of 2010.

The transportation agency selected the marina site April 2 as the best of four alternatives, one inside the marina and two near Golden Gate Fields in Richmond.

“It was selected as the environmentally superior site,” said Ian Austin, vice president for risk and marine services with URS, a San Francisco-based multinational engineering, design and construction conglomerate.

The site is also served by the 51 bus, he said, offering the best commute time for likely users, who are Berkeley residents who live in the hills. But commissioner Gene Poschman noted that AC Transit is currently cutting back on bus service, including the 51 line.

Austin said another factor favoring the marina site is that it offers the shortest travel time to the city across the bay at 25 minutes.

Austin said the ferry would also be a stimulus for businesses on Berkeley’s upscale Fourth Street, “and will provide for improvement to the Bay Trail.”

Plans include a covered terminal, designed by Berkeley Architects Marcy Wong and Don Logan, which would be built along the waterfront, as well as a new pier extending out from the terminal. The facility will be capable of handling two ferries at a time, he said.

Parking would be handled by enlarging and restriping the existing lot north of Hs Lordship’s restaurant, plans that also call for removal of the berm that now separates the lot from Seawall Drive. Central Parking Co. would provide valet service for 91 cars, with the drivers’ vehicles ready for them by the time the ferry docks, he said.

Poschman said he wondered how many people would use cars, and if the 387 parking spaces planned for ferry users would be adequate, especially given possible cutbacks in bus service.

Austin said WETA also calculates that 6 percent of their riders will arrive on bikes, which can also be taken aboard the boats. Covered secure parking would be provided for bikes that remain behind, he told commissioner Victoria Eisen, who had voiced concern about possible bike theft.

Most commissioners said they didn’t have problems with the project.

“I think it’s a good idea to have emergency service,” said Teresa Clarke.

“I think it’s a good project,” said James Samuels.

But Stoloff said he wondered if the ferry was really needed “if the new Bay Bridge is as strong as they say it is.”

“It’s capable of entirely changing the use of the waterfront,” said Poschman, “and I don’t think the parking thing is worked out well at all.”

“An enormous empire is being built with enormous amounts of money,” said commissioner Patti Dacey, who said that the ferry would change the use of the waterfront, and some ferries have environmental problems of their own.

Commissioner James Novosel said he wasn’t happy with the landscaping plans and hoped a design feature such as a traffic roundabout could be added.

Helios West

UC Berkeley officials gave the commission a preview of their plans for their first major downtown project under the legal settlement with the city that ended a lawsuit challenging the university’s’ Long Range Development Plan 2020.

While most commissioners said they liked the design drawings, criticisms focused on the building’s northern face along Hearst Avenue and the design of a public open space along Berkeley way.

The new building will house the university’s Energy Biosciences Institute, funded by a $500 million grant from BP, the former British Petroleum, to use genetically engineered microbes to transform plants into transportation fuels.

“This is a much better place for it than up on the hill,” said commissioner Harry Pollack, referring to the original site above Strawberry Canyon at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

That site was later rejected after a lawsuit was filed by Friends of Strawberry Canyon, a group of Berkeley environmentalists. The university insists that the suit wasn’t the reason for the change.

While McDougall said the city’s now-stalled new Downtown Area Plan would have allowed for the plan 100 feet height all long Hearst, the plan allowed only for 120 feet at the corner of Hearst and Oxford, dropping down to 65 feet toward Shattuck.

The new lab will occupy part of the site which now houses the abandoned state Department of Health Services building, which occupies most of the two blocks between Hearst and Berkeley Way between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue.

When a Whole Foods shopper stabbed a would-be carjacker with a pair of scissors, she did more than fend him off: She inadvertently collected the DNA that would lead to an arrest.

The Dec. 30, 2008 incident in the Whole Foods parking lot on Telegraph Avenue was the first of at least three linked to the man arrested Thursday morning in Oakland by Berkeley police.

According to Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Officer Andrew J. Frankel, police arrested 52-year-old Paul Anthony McGruder during an early Thursday morning search of his residence in the 5900 block of Camden Street after DNA tests had linked him to the crime.

The chain of crimes began at 10:30 a.m. on the second to last day of 2008 when a man with a gun approached a woman in the supermarket parking lot and ordered her into her car.

After she had seated herself, the woman screamed, prompting the gunman to punch her in the face and then try to take control of the car himself. At that point, the woman came up with the scissors and stabbed them into the gunman’s neck, prompting him to abandon the carjacking.

Spotting another potential victim in the parking lot, he tried and failed again, finally succeeding minutes later when he confronted a driver on Halcyon Court, where he managed to get his hands on a 2008 Subaru and fled the scene.

Following his arrest, McGruder was taken to Alameda County Jail and booked on three counts of carjacking and one count of kidnapping during the commission of a carjacking, Frankel reported.

Oliver Williamson accepts the congratulations of a colleague in a morning phone call.

UC Berkeley professor Oliver E. Williamson was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics Monday, Oct. 5, along with Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom for their work in organizational economics.

Williamson’s award brings the total number of economics Nobels for UC Berkeley to five—with three being awarded in the last nine years—and its overall Nobel tally to 21.

Williamson is the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus of Business, Economics, and Law at Berkeley, and a major contributor in the multi-disciplinary field of transaction cost economics.

Ostrom is the Arthur F. Bentley professor of political science and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. She is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Appearing at a 10 a.m. press conference at the Alumni House on the Berkeley campus Monday, Williamson said he had been awakened by his son who handed him the phone at 3:30 a.m. saying, “I think this is the call.”

The Economic Sciences Prize Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Williamson “for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm.”

The prize committee said Williamson had been awarded the Nobel for “developing a theory in which business firms serve as structures for conflict resolution,” focusing on the problem of regulating transactions that were not covered by detailed contracts or legal rules, arguing that markets and firms should be viewed as alternative governance structures that have different ways of resolving conflicts of interest.

Williamson first joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in economics in 1963, leaving two years later to teach at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. He returned to UC Berkeley in 1988.

He is credited as a co-founder of “new institutional economics,” a school of thought that emphasizes the importance of both formal institutions and informal institutions, such as social norms, and how they affect transaction costs.

Williamson describes his work “as a blend of soft social science and abstract economic theory.” His ideas have been used to understand a wide range of organizational and institutional pacts, including the choice and design of contracts, corporate financial structure, antitrust policy and the size and scope of firms.

Scott E. Masten, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, said the “heart of Williamson’s economic organization work emphasizes the limited ability of people to make perfectly informed decisions, and the propensity of at least some individuals to act opportunistically.”

“I was quite surprised to hear my former student had won the Nobel Peace Prize,” said UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Christopher Edley, referring to Barack Obama’s unexpected award, “but I was not surprised to hear this. For years [Williamson] has been an anchor for regulating behavior and dealing with issues of authority and agency. We could not be more pleased.”

Edley was joined by the dean of the Haas School of Business Rich Lyons and chair of the Department of Economics Gérard Roland.

“Berkeley is a multidisciplinary place,” Lyons said, which helped to create an intellectual space for everyone on campus.

Lyons praised Williamson for his work on the formal organization of firms, adding that his work created a “profound influence on young people” that had changed their lives and created an intellectual environment for all of them.

“Professor Williamson made a major contribution to understand the boundaries of a firm,” said Roland. “Nobody else has made such a contribution to putting institutional economics in the forefront. He has taken transactions between business partners to the forefront.”

Williamson earned his undergraduate degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s in business administration from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

He has also been awarded 10 honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

In response to questions from reporters about his thoughts on the current economic meltdown, Williamson underscored the importance of deregulation in both the public and private sectors, including banks.

“An organization should have a council of economic advisors and organizational advisors and there should be interaction between them,” he said, and both sellers and buyers should be mutually respectful of one another.

Williamson and Ostrom will share $1.4 million and each will receive a gold medal and diploma from the king of Sweden Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who established the Nobel Prize to honor individuals for their achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature in his will in 1896.

The Swedish central bank created the economics prize in 1969 in honor of Alfred Nobel.

When asked what he felt about the current budget crisis at UC Berkeley which is threatening research opportunities on campus, Williamson said it was pertinent for “Sacramento to step up in these times of trouble” to save valuable educational resources.

More than 5,000 students and faculty at the university walked out of class on Sept. 24 to protest budget cuts, fee hikes and furloughs, and students are planning a conference to organize against the cuts Oct. 24.

The City of Berkeley received its first shipment of intranasal H1N1 vaccine from the state Tuesday, Oct. 6, the same day it administered more than 2,000 seasonal flu vaccines to the public.

Berkeley’s Health Department spokesperson Zandra Lee said the city had received a total of 800 vaccines, of which 100 were allotted to the city and the rest to private health care providers.

The number of vaccines was based on Berkeley’s total population, she said.

Approximately 400,000 doses of H1N1 nasal spray vaccine arrived in California this week. More doses are expected in the coming weeks, including the injectable flu shot.

Lee said the city—under advice from the Centers for Disease Control—was prioritizing the first small shipment for children two to 10 years of age and caregivers of young infants.

She said that CDC had targeted the two groups because the nasal mist could not be used on pregnant women, people with chronic illnesses and those over age 59—the other high-priority groups the federal health agency had selected for receiving the swine flu vaccine.

The city’s Health Officer Janet Berreman said in an e-mail message that as more vaccines came in, priority would be given to pregnant women, young people six months through 24 years of age, health care workers and emergency medical responders, caregivers of infants under six months of age and adults 25 to 64 years of age with chronic health conditions.

Berreman said that “when all of those priority groups have had the opportunity to be vaccinated, vaccines would be available for healthy 25- to 64-year-olds and adults 65 and over.”

“We fully anticipate that there will be ample vaccine for all who want it, within the next month or two,” she said. “In the meantime, it will be shipped as it is available, and will be made available to the public as it comes to providers—but it’s difficult to predict dates and quantities. We are working with health care providers in Berkeley who serve priority group patients and to make vaccines available through health care provider offices. People in priority groups should contact their usual source of health care regarding vaccine availability.”

Lee said Berkeley residents could check the city’s Health Department website for updates on the city’s future H1N1 vaccination plan. “We have been told that we should be getting a shipment every two weeks,” she said.

Although the city will not be turning anybody away, the focus right now is on the uninsured and people without private doctors.

“We are recommending that people who have insurance go to Kaiser and Berkeley providers since they have got the lion’s share of the vaccines,” Lee said. “We only have a small amount.”

Swine flu vaccination clinics are expected to go up at each Berkeley public school the week of Nov. 16.

Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson Mark Coplan said parents would be given the schedule in advance so that they could plan ahead.

“We are making it clear that the H1N1 vaccines are voluntary, but encouraging everyone to get it,” Coplan said. “Parents need to think not just about their child but also the child sitting next to them.”

Rumors about the new swine flu vaccine have been circulating on the TV and Internet, resulting in doubts about its safety.

While most doctors and medical practitioners say it’s safe, some view it as potentially dangerous.

Lee, however said that both the CDC and the California Department of Public Health was strongly advising everyone to get vaccinated against the H1N1.

“The CDC has been very clear that the vaccine is being produced the same way as the regular seasonal flu vaccine,” she said. “We have a long history of providing seasonal flu vaccine and we expect the H1N1 vaccine to be just as safe.”

The H1N1 virus has hospitalized 2,748 people and killed 206 in California so far. Berkeley has had one fatality.

For more information on the swine flu vaccine visit CityofBerkeley.info/publichealth or www.flu.gov or call the City of Berkeley’s nurse of the day at 981-5300.

A group of UC Berkeley law students launched a torture accountability initiative Tuesday, Oct. 13, dedicated to holding the authors of the infamous Bush torture memos accountable, reinstating respect for the prohibition against torture and ending executive abuse of power and impunity.

Called the Boalt Alliance to Abolish Torture (B.A.A.T.), the group, at their kickoff Tuesday, hosted a panel of lawyers to discuss the memos crafted by the Bush administration’s legal counsels at the Department of Justice, including Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo, which attempted to legally justify the torture of military detainees in violation of both domestic and international law.

Yoo, who spent the previous semester at Chapman University, returned to the UC Berkeley School of Law, formerly Boalt Hall School of Law, this fall to teach Civil Procedure II.

He was met with protests from students, alumni and activists on the first day of class.

Berkeley law school Dean Christopher Edley has defended Yoo’s actions on the basis of academic freedom, saying in a public statement that the university would carefully review the Justice Department’s internal ethics investigation findings regarding the authors of the torture memos upon its release.

Berkeley law student and alliance member Megan Schuller said that Tuesday’s presentation was part of Ending Torture Month, a series of events and advocacy efforts scheduled to take place at Boalt Hall through mid-November.

Stanford Law School senior lecturer Allen Weiner, visiting Berkeley law school associate professor Gowri Ramachandran, Berkeley law school lecturer John Steele and McGeorge School of Law professor John Sims, discussed topics ranging from international, constitutional and national security law to professional ethics at a panel titled “Tortured Justice: Why the Torture Memos Were Illegal,” to a packed audience inside the law school’s Booth Auditorium.

A 10-minute film, Tortured Law, by Alliance for Justice, preceded the discussion, which was co-sponsored by at least a dozen social justice and student organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild–Boalt Chapter, Women of Color Collective, Boalt Muslim Students Association, South Asian Law Students Association, Law Students for Justice in Palestine and Alliance for Justice.

Schuller said that the panel had been designed to make students more aware of legal issues around the torture memos so that they are able to take an informed stance on this controversial issue.

She said that two of the alliance’s main goals are to push for accountability for all of the authors of the torture memos and to urge the university to open up its own inquiry into whether Yoo should retain his tenure at the law school instead of waiting for the Department of Justice to complete its probe.

The alliance has established a separate committee to underscore the importance of accountability.

“We hope we will inspire intellectual debate and discussion which as lawyers we are supposed to do,” said Schuller. “We are open to students who think this university is not the right forum for accountability. We think it is the right forum for accountability.”

Sims asked the public to wait for a professional investigation by the Obama administration into the enhanced interrogation techniques that took place under Bush instead of jumping to conclusions.

“Outsiders don’t know all the facts, I am not sure anyone knows all the facts,” he told the Planet. “John Yoo didn’t decide anything, but his piece of paper was part of the conspiracy to torture.”

In the meanwhile, Sims said, “we need to convince the rest of the world that this was aberrational,” he said. “It was a mistake and should not happen again.”

Weiner said that it would be difficult to bring a criminal case against Yoo.

“There could be a criminal case, but it would be a tough case,” said Weiner, who practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade before joining Stanford. “A lawyer is not held criminally responsible for giving legal advice merely because that advice later is determined to be wrong. Perhaps more important than the issue of criminal liability is for the Obama administration to make clear what role it believes government lawyers should play. Their job should not be simply to find a legal theory that allows policymakers to do whatever they want. The administration should make clear that government lawyers must identify the legal and policy risks raised by what clients want to do. That's how lawyers can best help form U.S. foreign policy.”

Second-year Berkeley law student and alliance member Gretchen Gordon said students decided to form the group to break the silence surrounding Yoo’s tenure on the Berkeley campus.

“For a lot of students, before they get to Berkeley John Yoo is the issue,” Gordon said. “People come to the university with some sort of awareness of the issue. But when they get here, it’s the elephant in the room. It’s not discussed. We want to change that.”

Although some Berkeley Law School students said they supported the alliance’s effort to publicize and address torture and U.S. detention policies, they hoped it would not become an attack on Yoo.

“I would probably join a coalition against torture, but I would not feel comfortable joining an alliance trying to remove John Yoo from teaching or to question the university’s decision to keep him until he is convicted of a crime,” said Berkeley law student Patrick Bageant. “I hope it’s not Professor Yoo they are after.”

Schuller defended her group’s position.

“We don’t see it as an attack on John Yoo,” she said. “We are asking for the investigation because of the violation of international and professional law. Government attorneys should be held to a higher standard. Yoo is open to have his own opinion and views, but it sends out a wrong message to students on campus—that it’s OK to violate the law.”

Schuller said she wanted to see something along the lines of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a court-like body set up to deal with human rights violations under apartheid, which could restore the legal principles against torture.

“The issue for students right now is not Professor Yoo, it’s John Yoo, government lawyer, who engaged in professional misconduct and illegal actions that had catastrophic consequences for human beings,” Gordon said. “When Yoo writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, he signs that as a Berkeley law professor and it adds weight to his credence.”

Schuller said the alliance, which at its fledgling stage has about 25 members, has not registered with the university as an official student group, but will soon.

Berkeley Law spokesperson Susan Gluss told the Daily Planet that students were allowed to form whatever group they wanted at Boalt.

“It could be to discuss all sorts of controversial issues—political, international, medical—UC Berkeley is the home of the free speech movement and we are a critical part of it,” she said. “I don’t think any group has ever been denied permission by the university.”

Gluss said Yoo’s classes were so popular at Berkeley that students had oversubscribed them this semester.

“He’s a great teacher,” she said.

Bageant, who has taken three classes under Yoo, including one in California state government, described him as “one of the best professors on campus." “He’s simply fantastic,” he said.

Schuller said although she had not enrolled in any of Yoo’s classes, she understood why they were so much in demand.

“He’s very charismatic—and students want to hear from someone who has a different opinion,” she said. “It’s my personal choice not to register for his class because what he did was ethically and morally wrong. But I believe in due process, and all I want is an investigation. I can’t ask for anything more.”

During the panel, Ramachandran addressed the possibility of the university investigating Yoo.

“The reason I am afraid of a UC investigation is because it’s not clear if a crime was committed by Yoo,” she said. “That’s why Edley is afraid to jump into something.”

Steele said the dean had “left open the door to discussion by another tribunal.”

“I don’t know if an academic senate would know how to prosecute a crime or ethics violation,” he said.

Berkeley law school lecturer Stephen Rosenbaum praised the alliance’s efforts.

“Recent national studies have chastised law schools for offering curriculum that is short on professional skills and values,” he said. “This initiative appears to be a serious effort by Boalt students to examine ethical and policy issues in a conventional format—presentations by scholars and practitioners.”

A Berkeley Community College classified employee speaks out against state budget cuts at Thursday's meeting in the BCC atrium.

Riya Bhattacharjee

Berkeley Community College English teacher Marc Lispi speaks at a Thursday meeting regarding state budget cuts to education.

Berkeley City College students, faculty and staff joined their counterparts at Laney and Merritt colleges to speak out against state budget cuts to public education at the Peralta Board of Trustees meeting in Oakland Oct. 13.

The four-campus Peralta College System, which includes Berkeley City College, is facing a $7 million budget deficit because of the state Legislature’s budget compromise with the governor in August.

Although the board was scheduled to discuss the impacts of the budget cuts at Tuesday’s meeting, they postponed it to Oct. 27.

Board president Bill Withrow asked Peralta Chancellor and former Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris to compile a video of the various student protests and send it to state legislators.

“We are encouraged by Withrow’s action, but we hope it’s not a shortcut around helping us during this time of struggle,” BCC student body president Matt Long told the Planet. Long said students are about to embark on a letter-writing campaign to ask their legislators for support during this time of crisis.

Berkeley City College students have been organizing against the cuts over the past several weeks and are planning to host a teach-in Nov. 7 to spread awareness about the community college budget system.

More than 20 speakers outlined struggles going on at the college and in their own lives during a packed meeting inside the college atrium Oct. 8, following which the protesters made plans for the Oct. 24 conference at UC Berkeley.

The event was organized by the college’s Global Studies Club.

At least 400 classes are expected be cut from the Peralta system and programs like CalWORKS and Extended Opportunity Programs and Services, which cater to socioeconomically and academically disadvantaged students, have already been slashed by 50 percent.

Berkeley City College is facing a $772,000 cut in student services and has already eliminated 20 classes for the fall semester, with more cuts planned for the spring.

“We are trying to get students to register early, but it’s a reflection of what the cuts have done to community colleges statewide,” said BCC President Betty Inclan. “As we cut classes, we will need fewer part-time faculty. We are very concerned about that. We are basically shutting down segments of education that provide opportunities. Community colleges are underfunded to begin with, but with these cuts the dream of providing education has been compromised. I call it the deferred dream.”

Like UC Berkeley, the college has implemented a hiring freeze, and furloughs might be in line for part-time instructors whose class hours have been reduced.

Joe Doyle, co-chair of BCC’s multimedia department, said student services were being cut to the bone.

“Students are laboring with jobs and families, and they can’t get the services they need,” he said. “There is student aid, but the people who staff the offices are being laid off. Students end up waiting in long lines. We need more people in financial aid.”

Doyle said classified staff were facing furloughs of up to six days.

Ayell Lemma, who heads the college’s EOPS and CalWORKS program, said a 40 percent cut to BCC’s 400-student EOPS program had resulted in tremendous challenges in terms of providing students with assistance to buy books, transportation to school, child-care support and school supplies.

Counseling and tutoring services have also been badly hit, he said.

“We need funding to backfill the cuts,” he said, “to provide the services that will make students educationally successful and self-sufficient.”

BCC spokesperson and marketing faculty member Shirley Fogarino told the Daily Planet that the state budget cuts had essentially decimated the CalWORKS program.

“The part which helps students to find jobs no longer exists,” she said. “It’s there on paper, but it doesn’t exist. Students are either dropping out of the program or dropping out of school entirely.”

Inclan said that when the CSUs and UCs turn away freshmen due to a lack of funding, the students seek out community colleges for admission—a plan she said might also be compromised under the current budget crisis.

Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seeking admission to community colleges for re-employment opportunities might have to be turned away for the same reason, she said.

“We are also being cut, it’s a ripple effect,” Inclan said. “We are trying our best to deliver quality education and yet resources are being eliminated.”

Marc Lispi, a part-time English teacher at BCC and a member of the Global Studies Club, said the Oct. 24 conference is expected to serve as a forum for an even bigger event on March 11, when hundreds of UC, CSU and community college students and employees are hoping to march to Sacramento to rally against the cuts.

“Community colleges are like a hub; we are connected to every single level of society,” Lispi said. “If we can organize against this fight, we can make sure it’s not a fight for crumbs. The money exists—the wealth is there. We can force them to take the money from where it exists.”

Global Studies Program Instructor Joan Berezin said the college is planning a teach-in Saturday, Oct. 10, on campus at which various community colleges would speak out against the cuts.

“Talk to 10 people you know—that’s how you start a movement,” she said.

Laney College Student Body President Ju Hong said that immigrants, low-income and international students are dropping out of Laney because they can’t afford school supplies, food or transportation.

“We are losing education at this moment,” Hong said, making a plea to students to organize against the cuts.

BCC sociology student Lydia Stevenson, urged her fellow classmates to speak out against the cuts.

“Raise your voice. Speak out. Words mean everything,” she said. “Demand your right to an education, demand that cuts happen from the top, not the bottom. And until they do, let’s be a pain in their ass. A big, red, irritated thorn.”

Stevenson, who has been in the community college system for five years, said all doors seem to be closing just when she is ready to make the transfer to UC Berkeley.

Senior citizens, single mothers and high school graduates all made their case one after another about why it was important to keep programs in community colleges alive.

“Education in California for the last 20 years has been systematically pushed underground,” said Buddy Roark, an English student, to hisses from the audience. “We now live in a state that has the ninth-largest economy in the world and is 49th in public school spending. The problem is a broken, neglectful tax structure that puts business before people—and that if we had to start from scratch we would never choose in the first place.”

Students are also facing cuts in library hours and databases.

“I guarantee you that textbooks will not be any cheaper next semester,” said Roark. .

The Courthouse Atheltic Club at 2935 Telegraph Ave. in Oakland was demolished Oct. 2.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story inaugurates a new Planet category, Partisan Position. It’s not always possible for staff reporters to cover all the news our readers would like to know about, so we’re soliciting submissions from writers who have a personal interest in stories they want to report. We ask them to try to include all relevant information and various points of view, but the Partisan Position warning label tells readers that the story they’re reading might not be completely impartial.

The Courthouse Athletic Club Building at 2935 Telegraph Ave., an unofficial Oakland landmark, has been reduced to rubble in a matter of days. The main structure fronting Telegraph came down Oct. 2, the conclusion of a rushed, surprise demolition by the developer and owner of the site, Trammell Crow Residential (TCR). Two stands of redwoods—also flagged for removal—still survive, for the moment. Two appeals pertaining to the demolition process and tree removal are pending, and controversy swirls over the flawed process that doomed the building, and what—if anything—will replace it.

Neighbors were startled by the wrecking crews beginning their work early Sept. 29. Even District 3 Councilperson Nancy Nadel, reached at her home, said she had no prior warning. Joann Pavlinec, case planner and secretary to the city’s Landmarks Advisory Board, and Chris Candell, a Community and Economic Development Agency staffer, had repeatedly assured those tracking the project that the demolition could not begin until permits were issueed and TCR had paid all its fees. The period for appeal to the City of Oakland’s Tree Division didn’t even expire until 4 p.m. Sept. 29. Pavlinec’s soothing words were perhaps purposeful—an Aug. 28 memorandum from Gay Luster in the Tree Division quotes Pavlinec that “...the project was a hot one, embroiled in opposition from the neighborhood.”

The endrun around the unissued permits was an unannounced memorandum from Eric Angstadt, deputy director of CEDA, on Sept. 25 allowing the demolition to proceed by “approving,” but not yet “issuing,” a building permit. Another behind-the-scenes green light, in the form of an e-mail from Mitch Thompson in the Tree Division, said the demolition could occur even as the redwoods remained standing, if temporary fencing was thrown up around them.

With the demolition permit then authorized by Ray Derania, the interim building official responsible for issuing demolition permits, TCR crews began the work the following Tuesday, without blocking sidewalks or streets, or alerting neighbors or owners of parked cars.

The back story

The process culminating in the demolition was outlined in an op-ed by this writer entitled: “Will High-End Condo Project Doom Courthouse?” in the July 9-15 edition of the Berkeley Daily Planet. The developer, TCR, with financing provided by Bank of the West, bought the then-functioning Courthouse Athletic Club for $7.7 million in 2005. One of many condo projects planned for Oakland in those heady times, TCR proceeded to spend (as of Nov. 21, 2008) $11.3 million for their project—142 market-rate condos in a high-end, five-story building covering the 1.4-acre site. Because the Courthouse Building was deemed eligible for the National Register, in an area of other important, mostly funerary structures, including the landmarked St. Augustine’s Church directly across the street, TCR was required to complete an environmental impact report (EIR). The Courthouse Building had evolved from a turn-of-the-century dwelling to become the Truman Mortuary in 1916, receiving its final and colonial makeover by Architects Miller & Warnecke in 1945. The project and the EIR were approved by the Jerry Brown-appointed Planning Commission in August 2007—this project was close enough to downtown to be part of Brown’s “10K” mission. Some neighbors supported the condo project which promised an infusion of tax dollars and new residents with a mix of incomes and spending power.

After approval the project went nowhere. TCR completed no building plans or applied for any permits (including tree removal), nor paid the required fees to the city. Shopping the project around, they found a willing buyer in the Oakland Housing Authority, which offered $9 million for the entitled project. OHA, however, required delivery of a cleared site prior to assuming title in order to avoid further federal environmental review and, ultimately, they withdrew.

Reaction

After phone calls from neighbors to City Hall, Angstadt did a partial about-face, on the advice of the city attorney's office, according to a Nadel aide. He revealed his memorandum recommending demolition proceed prior to issuance of a building permit, along with Thompson’s backup e-mail on the redwoods. An appeal of his “interpretation,” costing a nonrefundable $1,158, was able to be filed within 10 days, to the Planning Commission. No stay was attached to this new concession, and demolition proceeded apace, culminating with the building in splinters by Oct. 2. An appeal was filed anyway, including a pamphlet from the Planning counter, touting the “ReUse Solution: Save money and Waste! Weigh the advantages of deconstruction versus demolition,” part of the City of Oakland’s endorsement of green building practices.

Also pending is the appeal—this one to the City Council and costing a nonrefundable $500—of the redwoods removal. Angstadt’s decision not only preempted neighbors but the City Council—the elected body—from weighing in. The Planning Commission’s 2007 approval had never been heard at the council level. If the council votes to keep the redwoods, the TCR condo project approved at staff level will have to be redesigned, since the redwoods exist within the footprint of the proposed new structure.

Oakland’s bizarre tree removal process allows only property owners who are “confronting or adjacent” to trees marked for removal to protest. In this case, according to mailing lists from the Tree Division, property owners across Telegraph and on 29th Street were noticed and allowed to object, but residents on the north side of 30th Street were not.

Condominium dwellers on this side of 30th Street are the group, along with other neighbors and preservationists, who opposed the possibility of the Housing Authority acquiring the site and many of whom now supported keeping the Courthouse Building. They created a NoOHA30thStreet/Save the Courthouse group, threw up a website, and produced Save the Redwoods posters.

After TCR threatened legal action against the neighbor who signed the first appeal, who then withdrew, another neighbor stepped forward to sign a new appeal.

Today

The antiquated redevelopment scenario of “slum” clearance and the creation of vacant for-sale lots appears to still be the name of the game in less empowered parts of Oakland, in contradiction to policies in place designed to prevent just such occurrences. City staff argued consistently that they didn’t know TCR would build something, but didn’t know that they wouldn’t either, and couldn’t demand proof. Planner Candell noted the developer fees underwrote two staff positions. But the condominium market is saturated (there are five large condominium project on hold in Temescal alone) and existing condo prices are falling. But in Temescal, the buildings slated for replacement by the as-yet-unbuilt condo projects are still standing and, in most cases, in use.

A prominent local developer has said the Courthouse parcel is worth perhaps $3.5 million. TCR/Bank of the West/CBRE Richard Ellis are gambling that, minus the historic building and redwoods, they’ll get some larger portion back of what they’ve squandered.

Robert Brokl is a North Oakland resident. This article is based upon two separate reviews of Oakland Housing Authority files on the Courthouse project, as well as reviews of the planning department and tree division files pertaining to the Courthouse and the redwoods.

There are probably few progressive people in Berkeley who have never had occasion to visit the Grassroots House in the 40 years since its establishment as a community space. This Sunday afternoon the house is throwing a party, promising great food and entertainment—and a pitch for much-needed donations.

Grassroots House, at 2022 Blake St., is a community building that provides office and meeting space for a number of social justice organizations.

“This house was purchased in the late ‘60s by a variety of activists,” said Andrea Pritchett of Copwatch. “Originally four people put their names on the lease ... so 40 years ago very far-thinking people bought the house and they made it available to the community.”

It’s called Grassroots House because “there was a community newspaper called Grassroots that was completely published in this house,” Pritchett explained. “When Copwatch came in here in 1991, Tenant Action Project was here and the Berkeley Tenants Union was here, but the other rooms in the house had mimeograph machines, (and) the stuff to print out the Grassroots paper.”

Over the years as the printing equipment was removed the house was adapted to new uses. A wheelchair ramp was constructed; the inside was carved up into a maze of offices and storage rooms and two former bedrooms in the rear were merged into one large meeting room. It has become a home for a community. Because the property taxes are low and the overhead is minimal it’s possible to provide space at low rents for groups that would otherwise not be able to afford it. Copwatch, for example, pays $150 a month. Nobody lives in the house, it operates like a cooperative, run by volunteers. In taking care of the place, Pritchett explained, “we all have tasks. One group takes care of the kitchen one does the bathroom; we all have tasks like roommates in a coop. It works. We’re trying to keep that spirit alive.”

Along with Copwatch, the Green Party, International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the Wobblies (IWW— yes, they’re still here) and the Prison Literature Project are long-time tenants. Many other groups meet there. “When the Berkeley Bowl workers were trying to get themselves together,” Pritchett recalled, “they would meet in the back room. Anti-war groups started here, Van Jones’ study group was here—all kinds of little seedling projects that sometimes turn into organizations and sometimes don’t.”

For 40 years the legal status of Grassroots House has been stable but the activists realized that problems could crop up. As Pritchett explained, “The folks who originally put their names on the lease understood that eventually, because it was privately held—essentially they were just generous hippy types who gave it to the folks—legalistically their names were on it. So if something happened to them, if they passed on, maybe a relative could force the sale of the house and kick all these groups out. So we realized that we had to go ahead and turn this house into a nonprofit.” John Selawsky, a long-time Green Party activist involved with Grassroots House, did much of the work to help it obtain 501(c)3 nonprofit status. This gives it the security of being controlled by the people who are there and also means they can sponsor other groups under their financial umbrella.

But the new status also creates some financial difficulties. The change in ownership meant a reassessment of the property from something like $40,000 that it was 40 years ago to $400,000 now, resulting in a huge increase in property taxes. There were also transfer taxes and other fees that needed to be paid. The requirements of nonprofit status limit how much they can raise the rents without getting donations from other sources. They also need money to make some urgent repairs to the building, which, at about 80, is showing its age. They are hoping that this fundraising event and appeals to the community will get the house back on its financial feet.

“I’ve always seen this as a community asset,” said Selawsky, “and I’ve always wanted to ensure that we kept it as a community asset. And we’ve been successful in doing that. Now we have to do the fundraising and the community organizing to make sure that people know we’re here, making sure people realize what we have here is an asset for the activist community and make sure to perpetuate that. This is the only one in Berkeley that I know of.”

“This house represents the last kind of communal, cooperative houses in Berkeley,” added Pritchett. “They used to be a dime a dozen in Berkeley ... this is probably one of the last ones left. And this is a vibrant, active center.”

Berkeley Unified School District announced Wednesday that it has been awarded a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to boost emergency management plans in its schools.

District spokesperson Mark Coplan said the district was thrilled with the news because it had initially expected to be awarded much less.

“It’s pretty phenomenal,” he said. “We were expecting only $100,000 for a district of our size, but to get a quarter of a million dollars is really incredible.”

Berkeley Unified competed in the federal “Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools” competition in April.

Coplan said the grant would enable it to work with community members and individual school sites and departments to create emergency management plans, train staff and the public to implement them and carry out exercises to measure the effectiveness of the program.

“We are delighted,” said the district’s Transportation Manager Bernadette Cormier. “The money will help us do major work on our central disaster plan and the individual schools’ disaster plans.”

The grant will also help the district to perform an in-depth risk analysis for the district’s potential disaster scenarios and develop a comprehensive emergency management plan.

Cormier said the funds would go toward resources, including incident command supplies, first aid, fire suppression and search and rescue operations.

The grant period runs from Oct. 1, 2009, through March 1, 2011.

The district will be working with the City of Berkeley, the local emergency management and school community throughout the period.

When asked whether Berkeley Unified was prepared for a major earthquake, Cormier pointed out that Berkeley was probably the only district in the Bay Area which had seismically retrofitted its schools.

“We were able to do this only because of the commitment of the district and the generosity of the city’s bond measure,” Cormier said.

The district will be moving its headquarters from the seismically unsafe Old City Hall building at 2134 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way to West Campus in 2011.

Cormier said the district would be taking part in the Great California ShakeOut Thursday, Oct. 15, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Millions of people throughout California are expected to take part in the ShakeOut drill (www.shakeout.org), the largest earthquake preparedness activity in U.S. history.

“We know that at some point a large-scale disaster could take place and we are preparing for it,” Cormier said.

The grant will also help the district plan for pandemic and food emergency scenarios.

Coplan said that the district has been working on overall emergency preparedness for over the last five years The Berkeley Fire Department has carried out search and rescue training at all the schools since then.

In the past, members of the Berkeley High School Safety Committee have urged the Berkeley Unified School District and former Superintendent Michele Lawrence to update emergency preparedness supplies in the Berkeley public schools, especially water.

In response to a request by Safety Committee member and Berkeley High parent Margit Roos Collins, Lawrence replenished the water containers at the school sites before retiring last year.

Collins, who has worked consistently on the district’s safety preparedness issues for sometime, could not be reached for comment by press time.

Cormier said district Superintendent Bill Huyett had asked for the water supplies to be updated over the winter or summer break.

“There has been a fabulous push last year and this year to upgrade all our emergency containers and on constant attention and vigilance,” Cormier said. “We are hopeful that the grant will only enhance things for the next 18 months.”

Anyone over age 25 or so who lived in or near the Bay Area on Oct. 17, 1989, probably remembers where they were at 5:04 p.m.

That was the day of the Big One, at least the biggest one—at magnitude 6.9—since the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 tipped the scale at a magnitude 7.8, nearly 10 times stronger on the logarithmic movement magnitude scale.

For those who lived in the Bay Area, the most stunning scenes came from Oakland, where the Cypress Street viaduct collapsed, sandwiching cars between two massive slabs of concrete and a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed.

And for San Francisco residents, scenes of collapsed and burning buildings in the Marina district offered stark reminders of the hidden power that can be unleashed when massive sheets of rock, buried miles beneath the surface, suddenly come unstuck.

At least 63 people died from the quake, nearly 4,000 more were injured, and thousands were left homeless, their homes, apartments and the accumulated possessions of a lifetime smashed and in ruins.

“We’re much better prepared than we were in 1989,” said Susan Tubbesing, executive director of the Earthquake Engineering Institute, the Oakland-based professional association for the nation’s earthquake-focussed professionals, including engineers, geologists and public policy officials.

“Berkeley is one of the better-prepared communities in the Bay Area, and has the best record by far for retrofitting single-family homes,” she said.

The city offers a partial rebate of the property transfer tax assessed at the time of sale if earthquake retrofits are made. Tubessing said the incentive was responsible for safeguarding about four of every five residences sold since the program was put in place.

Another star in the Berkeley firmament is the University of California campus, which she said has conducted the most comprehensive structural strengthening and safety programs of any UC campus.

The campus also sits astride the Hayward Fault, which scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) have identified as the most likely source of the next major Bay Area earthquake

Both Pacific Gas and Electric and the East Bay Municipal Utilities District have strengthened their systems since Loma Prieta, Tubessing said, and San Francisco is launching a similar program.

“Berkeley is clearly in better shape than most communities in the Bay Area,” she said.The city’s controversial soft-story ordinance, designed to strengthen apartment buildings with inadequate ground floor support, has made slow but steady progress with work on many buildings already complete, and other cities are following Berkeley’s lead.

Another perilous structure, the unreinforced masonry building, is largely a thing of the past, and most of the threatened structures have either been reinforced or demolished, she said.

“All the bridges in the state have also been retrofitted since Loma Prieta,” Tubessing said. One result is the current work on the Bay and Golden Gate bridges, while work on the San Mateo Bridge has already been completed.

Tubessing started work with the institute in 1988, a year before Loma Prieta gave her first-hand experience of the aftermath of temblors.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, her organization dispatches teams around the world in the aftermath of major quakes in search of greater understanding of what happens when the earth moves.

“We published an entire book on Loma Prieta,” she said.

The organization also maintains a Bay Area map, available online, showing the location of retrofitted buildings. Anyone with a building not listed can add the structure to the map, which is located at www.earthquakeretrofit.org.

UC Berkeley’s Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) will host an all-day conference Saturday at the Mark Hopkins Hotel to discuss both the progress made since Loma Prieta and work that still needs doing.

The session runs from 8:15 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

One major concern of organizers of the event, a group which includes the USGS, the San Francisco city and county governments and CalTrans, is the declining federal support for research on quakes and mitigation measures.

The Berkeley-based PEER is a coalition of 20 universities, joined by several consulting firms, and works to improve building design, evaluate hazards and devise effective public policy solutions for seismic problems.

In announcing the conference, PEER Director Steven Mahin offered his own assessment of the progress made since Loma Prieta.

“We’ve come a long way in 20 years, but we’re still not where we want to be when it comes to risk reduction in a major earthquake,” he said, calling for more action from local governments “so that the next big earthquake becomes a quickly recoverable challenge instead of a catastrophic disaster.”

PEER reports and research are available online at http://peer.berkeley.edu. One report, “Bracing Berkeley,” describes the campus seismic retrofit program: http://peer.berkeley.edu/publications/bracing_berkeley.html.

In one of its briefest meetings in recent memory, the Berkeley City Council deferred staff action on revamping the city’s cellphone tower ordinance Tuesday night, saying that city staff already had too many projects to work on.

While the council generally lets out between 10:30 and 11, Tuesday’s light-agenda meeting adjourned at 8:30.

In other action Tuesday night, the council appointed—without discussion—Zach Cowan and Jane Micallef to the positions of city attorney and director of housing and community services, respectively. Both Cowan and Micallef had been serving in those positions in an acting capacity, Cowan for two years and Micallef for one.

And in a pre-meeting budget update workshop, councilmembers learned that Berkeley could be facing hiring freezes, salary reductions, and service cuts in the upcoming year due to a projected decline in city revenues.

Earlier this year, upon recommendation of the city’s Planning Commission, the council made minor changes to Berkeley’s Wireless Telecommunication Facilities Ordinance, the city law that governs the placement and regulation of cellphone towers in Berkeley. In its recommendation, the Planning Commission said that a wholesale revamping of the ordinance might be in order, and Tuesday’s meeting was supposed to begin that process.

Among the changes being suggested are setting up city-approved zones where cellphone towers can be located, a procedure that might spread the towers to more areas of the city, as well as finding ways to entice or encourage cellphone companies to adopt technologies that generate less electrical transmissions in their immediate vicinities, thus lowering the impact of those transmissions on surrounding neighborhoods.

But after a staff report threw cold water on the ability of city staff to begin the work of producing a Telecommunications Master Plan—saying, among other things, that the complicated project would require two years of work and tie up staffers from the Planning, Public Works, Information Technology, and city attorney’s departments and cause either a shift from other council priorities or additional hiring—the council took Mayor Tom Bates’ suggestion to set up a two- and possibly three-member council subcommittee to begin to look at how the city might modify its cellphone laws. Bates asked Councilmember Gordon Wozniak to head up that committee and Jesse Arreguín agreed to serve. Councilmember Max Anderson—a frequent and vocal critic of cellphone companies—was asked to serve on the subcommittee as well, but saying that he did not trust those companies to work in the best interests of Berkeley neighborhoods, Anderson said that he would “weigh my participation” on the committee before deciding.

While councilmembers asked the subcommittee to begin the process by meeting with cellphone company representatives, industry experts, and Berkeley citizens who have voiced interest in the issue over the years, in order to get back ideas on what technologies might be possible or desirable in the city, no timetable was set for subcommittee action or a report back to the full council.

In its budget workshop, city staff members told the council that the city’s two-year budget was already calling on $1.53 million in cuts in fiscal year 2011, beginning next July. In its workshop report, staff said it is “now considering implementing these cuts sooner as well as identifying additional cuts.”

Details of those proposed cuts are expected to be presented in regular council session sometime later this year.

The financially embattled AC Transit Bus District, which only two weeks ago decided to risk delay or possible abandonment of its long-planned, signature Bus Rapid Transit project in order to hold off some of its painful January bus service and personnel cuts, saw a glimmer of hope this week that it might be able to keep BRT essentially on track while preventing the worst of the cuts.

On Wednesday night, the AC Transit board was scheduled to consider a recommendation by AC Transit General Manager Rick Fernandez to delay any service cuts or personnel from the first of January until mid-March in order to give the district time to sort out the slightly brightening financial situation.

Postponing the cutbacks would mean an additional cost of $4 million to the district for operating with its current bus lines and staff for the first two and a half months of the year.

Part of the guardedly good news AC Transit is now considering is a recent California Supreme Court decision affirming an appeals court ruling that the State of California, since the 2007-08 budget, has illegally shifted at least $1.19 billion—and possibly as much as $4.19 billion—in tax money that California voters had intended in four separate statewide initiatives to go for mass transit projects in the state.

The Supreme Court and appeals court rulings may mean that some of that money would go back to agencies for which voters originally intended it, public transit organizations like AC Transit.

But while “this ruling could result in additional funding to the district,” a staff memo for Wednesday’s board meeting read, “when and how these funds might begin flowing is unknown.”

A second part of the somewhat-brightening financial picture facing AC Transit was the news that Metropolitan Transit Commission Executive Director Steve Heminger had agreed to support an AC Transit MTC fund-swap proposal to help stop some of the cuts while still leaving $45.6 in Regional Measure 2 funds committed to BRT.

That information, which was released at Tuesday night’s Berkeley City Council meeting by MTC Commissioner and Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates, could not be independently confirmed with AC Transit officials.

Faced with a projected $57 million operating deficit that caused the district to declare a fiscal emergency this year, AC Transit had planned personnel layoffs and a 15 percent cut in bus service for the beginning of next year.

But two weeks ago, at the initiative of AC Transit General Manager Rick Fernandez, the AC Transit Board of Directors voted to ask the Metropolitan Transit Commission to swap out $35 million in Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) capital-project-only funds already committed to BRT for unrestricted CMAQ funds that AC Transit could use to erase a portion of its deficit.

Bus Rapid Transit is AC Transit’s ambitious proposal to run faster-than-rapid, light-rail-like bus service between downtown Berkeley, downtown Oakland, and downtown San Leandro along the Telegraph Avenue/International Boulevard/East 14th Street route currently operated by the 1 and 1R lines, a majority of it along dedicated, bus-only lanes.

Swapping out the CMAQ funds could set back implementation of the BRT project a year, and it could mean either a scaled-down version of BRT or possible abandonment of the project altogether.

Fernandez had also recommended proposing a similar swap of $45.6 million in MTC-controlled Regional Measure 2 (RM2) funds also committed to the BRT project, saying that MTC Executive Director Steve Heminger would only agree to the fund swap if AC Transit could demonstrate the swap would stabilize the district’s finances over a 10-year period, and Fernandez did not believe such a stabilization—including holding off much of the planned service cuts—could be done without the RM2 funds included in the package.

Heminger’s recommendation is key to approval of the fund swap by the 19 member Metropolitan Transit Commission.

But at the request of Board Vice President Chris Peeples and in the belief that swapping both the CMAQ and the RM2 BRT funds might mean the death knell of BRT—something neither the AC Transit board or staff wants—the board voted two weeks ago to approach Heminger with the CMAQ-only proposal.

This week, according to Berkeley Mayor and MTC Commissioner Tom Bates, during a meeting that included General Manager Fernandez, AC Transit Board President Rocky Fernandez (not to be confused with the general manager), AC Transit Board member Jeff Davis, Bates, MTC Commission Chair Scott Haggerty, and AC Transit and MTC staff, the district got a welcome surprise when Heminger agreed to support the CMAQ-only proposal, leaving the Regional Measure 2 funds still committed to BRT for now.

Heminger’s support for the proposed two-year CMAQ-only swap comes at some cost to its financial independence. Prior to the release of the first year of CMAQ funds, Heminger said that AC Transit “must agree to a comprehensive, independent financial review that considers cost control and revenue enhancement strategies to ensure the district’s long-term financial viability.” And prior to the release of the second and final year of the CMAQ funding, Heminger said that AC Transit “must take the necessary steps to implement the identified strategies.”

As a condition of his support, Heminger also said that AC Transit should submit to a broader cooperation between East Bay transit agencies, who have often battled each other for scarce public transit dollars. At this week’s meeting, Heminger said that AC Transit must also “agree to an independent, comprehensive operational analysis for east bay and transbay service areas” in cooperation with such transit agencies as BART, and “where financially feasible…must agree to the subsequent implementation of the findings.”

What Heminger meant by such East Bay public transit cooperation was not spelled out in a memo of “proposed conditions” to the MTC proposed fund swap he released “for discussion” for his meeting with AC Transit officials.

All of this has not been finalized and must go before both the AC Transit Board and the 19-member Metropolitan Transit Commission for approval.

With a downtown UC Berkeley biofuel lab on the fast track for development, university officials are busily presenting their plans to the community.

City planning commissioners were slated to get the most detailed look Wednesday, Oct. 14, after the Daily Planet’s deadline, though a more general version was offered to the public last Thursday.

The structure will be the university’s first in downtown Berkeley under the campus Long Range Development Plan 2020, which calls for up to 800,000 square feet of new off-campus buildings in the city center.

A lawsuit of the university’s plans resulted in the new Downtown Area Plan, which has been blocked by a citizen referendum campaign.

Caleb Dardick, the university’s new community relations director, described the proposed structure Thursday night as “something beautiful that will address climate change issues.”

The building will occupy the northeast quadrant of the site now occupied by the vacant seven-story building that once housed the local offices of the state Department of Public Health at 2151 Berkeley Way.

The two-block-long site is also scheduled to house a new UCB community health campus, a project as yet unfunded and with no set date for construction.

“It’s an exciting project for the campus, because they’re finally letting us build something downtown,” said Vice Provost Catherine Koshland.

While the university has also announced plans to build a new home for the campus art museum and Pacific Film Archive, no date has been announced for that structure, which depends entirely on private donations, she said.

Helios West, as the building has been dubbed, will house Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) research on genetically engineering microbes to harvest plant cellulose sugars and transform them into transportation fuels.

That program has been funded by a $500 million grant from BP, formerly British Petroleum and once known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.

Other EBI research focusing on photovoltaic and eletrochemical means of energy production will be housed in a second, smaller lab to be built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s campus in the Berkeley hills.

The new downtown building will rise to 100 feet, including a 16-foot-tall rooftop parapet to mask the building’s mechanical systems, according to the information packet supplied to the Planning Commission.

Consisting of five stories and an underground level, the building would be encased in a glass shell, with meeting rooms above the ground floor.

EBI Assistant Director Susan Jenkins said one of the program’s goals is educational, because “when misinformation starts to be disseminated, it is not good for the activity and not good for the public.”

Critics of biofuels—or agrofuels as they are sometimes called—have charged that they will compete with food crops in Third World nations and allege that backers have misstated the true energy and environmental costs of the fuels as well.

Jenkins also said one goal of the research was to provide the nation with energy security, a goal which has also been cited by Pentagon planners, including now-retired Air Force General Charles Wald.

Campus planner Jennifer McDougall told Thursday’s gathering that the design will include one key request from the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC), the citizen group which prepared the initial version of the downtown plan.

DAPAC asked the university to include open space and a north–south public pathway in the middle of the site. Tentative plans for the site now include both the pathway connecting with Walnut Street at either end and a green plaza to the south of the new building.

Sally McGarrahan, the building’s project manager, said the university is not providing any parking for the approximately 240 researchers and support personnel who will work in the building, though Jenkins said many bike to work or have parking available on campus.

Christine Shaff, communications manager for the campus Department of Facilities Services, said the site will be enclosed by a fence during the first week of November for completion of the removal of hazardous materials from the old building.

That work will continue into January, with demolition to begin the following month if approved by the UC Board of Regents, with completion set for June.

Among those in the audience for the Thursday session were City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín, city Economic Development Manager Michael Caplan, downtown planner Matt Taecker, Planning Commissioner James Samuels and Puja K. Sarna from AC Transit.

The Office of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Monday that it wants to terminate the Point Molate casino project.

Andrea Lynn Hoch, the governor’s legal affairs secretary, has asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to reject the proposal by a Berkeley developer and the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians to build a $1.5 billion casino resort on the Richmond shoreline.

“We write to express opposition to this land acquisition,” Hoch wrote to BIA Regional Director Dale Morris and Richmond Mayor Gayle McLaughlin.

While McLaughlin opposes the casino projects, the majority of her colleagues on the Richmond City Council have endorsed the plan and the developers’ promises of millions in revenues and thousands of new jobs in a city with high rates of unemployment and poverty.

Before a casino can be built, the BIA has to take the land into trust as a reservation for the Guidivilles, a Northern California tribe which lost its reservation five decades ago.

The proposed site on Point Molate is a former Navy refueling station deeded to the city under provisions of the federal Base Closure and Realignment Act, which provides for transfer of abandoned bases to local government for the purpose of creating new economic activity.

The governor’s office charges granting the tribe the right to build a casino would violate state public policy and the “notions of cooperative federalism that lie at the heart of” the federal tribal gaming act and “may also undermine the constitutionality of California’s Indian gaming regime.”

In closing, Hoch wrote, “Land acquisitions that would allow Indian gaming are contrary to the intent of the voters of the state and the state’s policy.”

A copy of the letter was also sent to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

A Sacramento firm hired by the developers is currently finishing a joint environmental report under the provisions of both state and federal law, one of the final steps made before the BIA decides whether or not to grant the Guidivilles casino rights at the site.

The project is being promoted by a consortium created by Berkeley developer and former environmental consultant James D. Levine, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Napa developer John Salmon and the Rumsey Band of Wintuns, who operate one of California’s richest gambling resorts, the Cache Creek Casino in Yolo County’s Capay Valley.

“It’s in the drink, man! The Bay Bridge has fallen down!” Uh oh, it’s going to take a while to get home tonight. The man in front of me with the radio pressed to his ear continues to relay news to the fans around us. We’re here for the third game of the World Series. Five minutes ago, the earth shook, and the crowd cheered. Now we start to realize the magnitude of what’s happened.

A few minutes earlier, Candlestick started to shake like crazy. I looked around in astonishment during the 15 seconds of the temblor. Down below me on the field, a long mound of earth rolled its way under the sod across the outfield from left to center, like a gigantic rolling pin gone mad underground. The grandstand to my right rippled like a bedsheet on a windy day. Above me, the wind baffle, built years before in an attempt to control the notorious Candlestick weather, flapped around like cardboard.

The shaking stopped. After a moment of astonished silence, the crowd broke into a long, excited cheer. What better way to celebrate this meeting of the Giants and the A’s—this Battle of the Bay—than with a quake? What could be more appropriate, more San Francisco … and Oakland?

A friend who was in line for beer tells me no one left the line during or after the quake. I look again at the wind baffle. Like the rest of the park, it’s made of reinforced concrete and appears undamaged. Clearly only massive, unimaginable force could cause it to flail around that way. Then we hear that the power is off all over the city and the Bay Bridge is in the drink, and it slowly becomes clear they’re not playing a game tonight.

I spend the evening in the city with a friend, and around midnight decide to head home to the East Bay. I can’t hop on the broken Bay Bridge, so I’ll drive through San Francisco to the Golden Gate Bridge, then cruise home circuitously through Marin County and across the Richmond Bridge. I start out through empty Potrero Hill streets. It’s eerily dark and quiet in the neighborhoods. The city, usually bright and full of life, has a dead, creepy, Escape from New York feeling. I hear sirens in the distance.

The excitement level increases when I cross Market Street and head north on Van Ness. Though a few sections of the city have power and the fires continue to rage in the Marina, most streetlights and traffic lights on my route are still out. Police direct traffic at some intersections, and others are completely uncontrolled and dangerous. But many corners have ordinary people out in the middle of the street trying to coordinate the flow of traffic, doing their best imitations of arm-waving traffic cops. In the face of our recent disaster, this spontaneous citizens’ self-mobilization has people smiling and waving at each other.

Eventually I get home and reunite with my family. All are safe.

Tragically, a few hundred people are killed. Most neighborhoods are untouched, but Loma Prieta, the Quake of ’89, has a powerful emotional effect. A few people I know threaten to move back to Kentucky, or Florida, or wherever. I have too much time on my hands in the economic lull that follows, and my mood sours. Each time I take our pooch to the dog park, I find myself wondering how I’d get back if another quake hit and the only road in were broken. I obsess about how I would have reacted if the quake had hit earlier in the day, when I was on the bridge. I worry if our house and deck are sufficiently braced for another shaker.

I’m absorbed by earthquake news and nervewracked by each aftershock. I feel compelled to go see the fallen Cypress Structure and take the dog with me. She throws up in my car. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I’m depressed.

I’m not the only one. I see on the news that the earthquake has emotionally discombobulated lots of others. TV shrinks implore us all to seek help, to talk about what happened, to share our experiences with those around us. I pass my neighbor in the street and impulsively launch into a detailed description of the events at Candlestick, the rolling pin, the wind baffle, my drive across the city. She looks at me warily, then blurts out her story: She was at home when the quake struck, and ran down the stairs from her house to the street, watching the utility poles on our block whip back and forth like a cartoon, as the ground rolled and shook … an image I now have engrained in my memory as deeply as if I’d witnessed it myself.

I wander down to the Burger Depot and order a turkey burger as I spill my story again to Dave, the owner. He tells me he was scared as the place shook and plates and glasses rattled off shelves around him.

The whole region slowly gets back to normal. The World Series resumes after a 10-day delay, but it takes a few weeks for my psyche to soothe. Gradually I start to feel better. Eventually, nearly half a million people claim to have been at Candlestick for the earthquake.

The Bay Bridge is out for exactly a month. The day before it opens to traffic, they plan a ribbon-cutting ceremony out on the bridge, right at the repaired section, with the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland in attendance. When the state announces that the public will be allowed to walk out onto the Bridge—for the first time ever—to attend the ceremony, I feel that I must bear witness. Having been present at the disaster (I consider that attending the Earthquake Game at Candlestick has given me a very personal stake in this earthquake), I want to be present at the re-creation of the bridge. I take my son out of first grade, impress upon him the historical importance of the occasion, and drag him along.

We board buses with hundreds of others, which drop us just past the toll plaza and metering lights, and we all begin the long, slow uphill trek. The break was in the very last roadway section before the girdered, Erector-Set superstructure. The mammoth size of the bridge awes us as we tread where no mere mortals have gone before.

We both start out in a positive frame of mind. It’s a beautiful day, sunny and brisk. This section of the bridge has a fresh coat of paint. Caltrans workers with hard hats stand every few feet, greet us with big smiles, and thank us for coming. The media swarm. The mood is festive.

A radio reporter interviews my son, who tells her that his daddy assured him “the fixed part of the bridge is now stronger than it was before the earthquake” and that it’s important for us all to walk out here “to show we know the bridge is safe again.”

But after a long walk, the novelty wears off, and reality sets in. Only four weeks ago, this old bridge shook enough to break its massive concrete roadbed. He starts to get scared and wants to turn back. That’s OK with me. The bunting and crowds are visible up ahead, another five or 10 minute walk. But I’ve had my moment of history. I’ve had my bridge walk. Who cares if we get to see some smelly old ceremony with a bunch of politicians? New memories are replacing the old ones. We turn and trudge back to the buses. The healing is well under way.

Bill Zarchy is a freelance director of photography, teacher, and writer who lives in Albany.

Opinion

Editorials

On Saturday morning I wasn’t even out of bed before my family started demanding that I write to someone about the snarky way the newsies have been commenting on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. I’m the designated writer in a family of opinionated people, and it seems they’re all mad about this one.

My mother had already started in on the topic the day before. She’ll be 95 next week, so she watches a lot of television these days, mainly C-Span, with occasional evening hits of Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow. She was originally a Hillary fan, but she’s warmed to Barack Obama, and she was outraged on Friday afternoon at what she thinks are inferior people (mostly middle-aged white men, she points out) who can’t grasp why the Nobel people recognized the president’s achievements so far. She knows what Obama’s up against in the Senate and the House because she keeps such a tight eye on Congress, and she thinks he’s doing a fine job, considering.

My husband’s wrath was provoked by Scott Simon on NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” which our alarm radio turns on even though we don’t have to get up early on Saturdays. Simon read a sarcastic opinion piece, a smarmy catalogue of accomplishments of previous feel-good winners like Jane Addams, which was mislabeled as a “story” on the NPR website. His conclusion: “The president said yesterday, ‘I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.’ He deserves to be taken at his word.” This made my husband so mad that he turned the radio off, causing me to miss “Car Talk” later in the morning.

Then it was my daughter, lingering at breakfast over the Santa Cruz morning paper, which these days consists mostly of reprints from the AP and national papers. She called insisting that I get up right away and tell them all off, not so much for the content of their pieces but for the tone. In the background I could hear my son-in-law, once upon a time mayor of Santa Cruz, muttering about how these press do-nothings who’d never held public office thought that Obama hadn’t accomplished enough in less than a year. They both wanted to know what these guys had accomplished in the same time period.

So I got up and checked on the web to see what nastiness I’d missed in the national press. On the Washington Post website Michael Kinsley, a self-identified liberal, contributed a labored satire in which Obama is awarded several literary prizes and an Oscar.

Most of the articles I found faulted Obama for not having done much yet. On the right, uglies like GOP chair Michael Steele hoped he never would. On the far left, historian Howard Zinn, a lifelong professional outsider, revealed on the Truthout site that he’s “shocked” that the Nobel Prize could be given for promises alone.

Why? Many of the winners cited by smug commentators like Simon did begin some great work, but few of them survived to see what they started completed. Despite Jane Addams’ 40 years at Hull House, poverty and ignorance are still alive in Chicago. Lech Walesa did get the Soviets out of Poland, but the current Polish government is nothing to brag about. Martin Luther King, like Moses, died before he reached the promised land.

Most readers and listeners commenting online got the idea better than the pros. Timothy McIndoo, for example, wrote to NPR: “If the Committee’s choice of President Obama is flawed, perhaps the wrong measure is being used. Rather than honoring decades of unquestionably exemplary work in the past—a kind of static award—perhaps the Committee has chosen this time to confer a dynamic award, one that requires its humble but willing recipient to realize the exceptional potential of the work he has just begun.”

E-mailers used terms like “jealousy” and “sour grapes” to characterize the press’s disparagement of Obama. Journalists with a caustic streak had a field day with George Bush, and many of them don’t seem to have gotten over the experience. They commonly claim, incorrectly, that Obama’s poll numbers are dropping, but regular people, my family included, still admire him, still like his politics of hope, and still expect that he has a few moves up his sleeve.

What the naysayers miss is that world peace in our lifetime isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. No one reading this now can expect to be around when and if true peace is reached. A Chinese maxim attributed to Confucius is that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The Nobel committee honored Obama for stepping out on the path to peace. They honored all of us in America for choosing him to lead the way, and now it’s up to us to make sure that he doesn’t get lost.

How to do that? There are the usual choices: write letters to the president, to the press and to Congress, march with signs, lobby your local Democratic party central committee, join Code Pink to act out your opinions in living color, pay big bucks to attend the Democratic dinner with Obama at the St. Francis in San Francisco tonight and express yourself there…the possibilities are endless.

This Saturday, Oct. 17, the disparate branches of what we might loosely call the peace movement are planning to do stuff you might like to join. Details can be found on a website, october17.org, which carries this disclaimer:

“Endorsing organizations and coalitions will advance their own demands for these protests based on their own platforms. Endorsement does not imply support for the demands agreed to at the July 10-12 national conference in Pittsburgh or by any coalition or network. The demands will be developed locally and regionally, and will be decided upon by the endorser organizations and individuals and by the coalitions themselves.”

Two local choices: a “Mass Antiwar March and Rally” starts at 11 at UN Plaza in San Francisco, with a variety of endorsers including the Social Justice Committee of the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian-Universalists. Or for a quirkier choice that day, even closer to home, Bonnie Hughes, the indefatigable heart of the Berkeley Arts Festival, has organized “War is Just a Racket Day, a reading and sing-along” as a Berkeley action against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. From noon to 3 p.m. at the downtown Berkeley BART Plaza, participants will read from Smedley Butler’s “War is Just a Racket” and sing what Bonnie calls “Songs for Peace”. You could easily make this one.

Public Comment

At the request of Councilmember Gordon Wozniak, Berkeley’s Fair Campaign Practices Commission is looking at raising the $250 contribution cap on all or some candidate races in Berkeley.The commission is holding a public workshop on the subject, today, Thurs., Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. at the North berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst, classrooms A and B. The commission will also be looking into pre-election notice and/or reporting requirements for independent expenditures.

The suggestion that the contribution cap be increased raises many interesting questions. How much should an election cost? How will it impact the possibility of public financing of local elections? Will raising the cap just make it possible for a small group of people to buy an election? Shouldn’t candidates be looking for broad support? How green is it so send out six or eight glossy flyers that are just going to end up in the recycling bin?

Because of the Internet the nature of cam paigning is undergoing rapid change. It is now possible to reach many people through email at a fraction of the cost of a mailing. Just as important, no contribution is too small when it comes online donations. Many email groups are being established giving a voice to groups that previously sat silent. The speed that information can be disseminated through the community is greatly increasing—all at a cost of a few cents. The nature of campaigns are changing.

I believe that raising the contribution cap will not serve us well.

Tim Hansen

•

Interactive Math

Editors, Daily Planet:

The small school concept at Berkeley High School is admirable and provides substantial benefits to students by offering a study program that focuses on individual students’ interest, skills and goals. However, the recent decision to rescind previously available options in math instruction for small school students calls for reconsideration.

A student assigned to one of the small schools are also assigned to a single option for the study of mathematics, regardless of individual interest, abilities or aspirations. Thus, my daughter, who desires to study Geometry, is placed in the only option available, IMP, (Interactive Math Program).

My wife and I believe that the IMP program is not an appropriate course of instruction for our daughter needs, as it doesn’t offer a complete instruction in mathematical techniques and falls short of logically interrelating core mathematical concepts.

We fail to understand why certain doors of opportunity are closed to a significant number of students. As currently implemented, the small schools rigidly deny reasonable and available educational opportunities to a select group of students, based solely on small school affiliation. IMP should not be a mandatory course of study or the only available option for every individual student within the small schools.

IMP is an alternative to traditional math; it is not, and can never be a replacement for every other math program offered. Unreasonable, absolute denial of readily available educational opportunity and choices for anyone, hurts everyone.

Charles Bryant

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SMOKING BAN

Editors, Daily Planet:

I’m ignoring the smoking ban. I like my cigar and a nice walk in the evening.

John Panzer

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PEOPLE’S PARK BOOK

Editors, Daily Planet:

I just got a copy of the new People’s Park book at Moes Books and it is a beautiful piece of work. Terri Compost and the Slingshot coalition did a magnificent job putting the thing together. The concept, the format, the design, just fabulous. Its a hell of a lot of fun. It reads like a yearbook of all the People’s Park patriots. All them People’s Park people. Read it and weep. It is surely a Berkeley classic. Grab one quick before they’re all sold out.

Ace Backwords

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UC’S FAILING GRADE

Editors, Daily Planet:

Just wondering: what’s up with the University of California using water all summer long like they’re situated on the wet side of Kauai to keep their campus looking deep green? We in the rest of our fair city are admonished, rightly so, to restrict and conserve water use during what’s developed as a very long dry spell.

Also, while I’m on the topic of the University and its failing grade for citizenship, wouldn’t it be nice if campus officials opened UC’s huge, and generally empty, parking structure on Oxford to evening parking for theater and restaurant going? Just an idea, I’ll leave it at that.

Bonnie Holl

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DREAMS INTERRUPTED

Editors, Daily Planet:

This week, I had the distinct pleasure of viewing the premiere Berkeley performance of “When Dreams are Interrupted,” a Purple Moon Dance Project production. In this remarkable and poignant piece, dance, theater, visual art, music and narration converge to transport the audience back in time. The time: 1942. The place: The thriving Japanese-American neighborhood of south Berkeley. This tells the story of how American citizens were unjustly uprooted from their homes, schools and businesses to be placed in concentration camps throughout the United States. What was lost could be fully acknowledged, discussed and analyzed if we are to progress as a free and democratic society.

This profound and moving work of art should be seen by every American.

Kevin Moore

•

Aquatic Park

Editors, Daily Planet:

Berkeley’s Aquatic Park and SF’s Marshall Beach are both managed—by different entities—open spaces, but with two distinct philosophies. Marshall Beach is a natural park; it is a beach as a beach should be. Aquatic Park was the shoreline, until the freeway was added in the 1930s. Aquatic Park is a landscaped park, with its stretch of lawn, as opposed to maintaining the fidelity what that area should naturally look like. Both parks have cultural significance to the Queer community, yet the respective managements hold different views on maintaining that status. The issue at hand is sex between men. While these activities are met with nonchalance at Marshall—it is accepted as a Queer adult beach—the city of Berkeley is attempting a crackdown at Aquatic Park.

Officer Frankel of BPD, director of parks William Rogers and park superintendent Sue Ferrera have a smear campaign dripping with homophobia against the fairly large community of men who use the park. It has been asserted by the police and Berkeley parks management that men are leaving piles of feces everywhere, shooting up and leaving needles everywhere, disturbing the wildlife, constructing sex dens in the bushes, and are just a bunch of prostitutes. This is a very disturbed and untrue portrait of the male sex-culture at Aquatic Park.

Firstly, homeless people are making shelters for sleeping; they are not tiny brothels. I would imagine one or two of these individuals have drug problems which might explain the occasional needle, but overall there isn’t a large problem with needles or with people sleeping. Secondly I would hope that most straight people understand that male intimacy doesn’t involve piles of feces.

The men who play at Aquatic Park are a representative sample of guys around town: Cal students, Cal employees, rich guys, poor guys, blue color workers, etc. Aquatic Park needs a little bit of work, but it is not the bio-hazard disaster area the city of Berkeley wants people to think it is. Over in SF, the straight community doesn’t use Marshall Beach, nudity and sex is decriminalized and the natural state of the park is respected by the Queer community to be kept safe and pristine. The Berkeley straight community should abdicate half of Aquatic Park, if not all of it, to the Queer community. Allow nudity and sex. Let men tumble and celebrate nature. Afterall, Berkeley is bear territory.

Nathan Pitts

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ac transit and Van hool

Editors, Daily Planet:

Ah, the recession! Could it actually have some positive effects? It seems thus in the AC Boards decision to loosen its Van Hool ties. If there is a God, thank you, God for forcing some enlightenment upon the director!

I absolutely believe in the needs of the handicapped, but how miserable must one make the ride of the others? To the average rider these buses say “I despise you, sucker! I will rattle your bones with political correctness! Love it or leave it!” One senses more ideology than practical design in these buses. The partial, timid seat modifications alter that impression very little.

The quotes from AC Transit Board member Chris Peeples about “how well we’ve been treated by Van Hool” were particularly noteworthy. On July 27, a small group of Oakland and Berkeley residents met with Peeples to discuss the Bus Rapid Transit proposal. Mr. Peeples said that only the Van Hool Company had been willing to allow AC Transit to design buses the way they wanted. He then said, “we made some mistakes.”

I am amazed that AC Transit was able to find any bus company willing to design buses with some of the wacky features of the Van Hools, such as engine placement in the middle of the bus, and the multi-platform seating.

I once had the pleasure to visit the Gillig bus company in Hayward. I was delighted to see buses in various stages of construction, mostly diesel/electric hybrids. Buses that were near completion revealed ample seating that appeared designed for comfortable transport of humans, rather than the odd perch-like formations that occupy the Van Hools.

Mr. Peeples’ snipe about the Gillig Company lacking the “depth in engineering” to redesign buses to AC Transit’s specifications was outrageous. Refusing to build buses to ridiculous specifications would seem an act of professionalism rather than evidence of an engineering deficit.

I certainly hope that AC Transit will begin to buy American buses. Unfortunately they have been purchasing Van Hools with abandon for years—passengers will have to live with those “mistakes” for a very long time.

Gale Garcia

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Van Hool Challenge

Editors, Daily Planet:

Coincidentally, every time I read the Planet’s coverage of the AC transit wheelings an dealings with the Van Hool bus manufacturers, an ongoing story, I was sitting on one—a Van Hool, not a story.

Reading on a Van Hool bus is actually a challenge, as never in my life have I been bounced so hard and so much by the roughest shock system ever engineered for public transportation. So I think it’s time for a little user feedback.

Van Hool buses are hazardous to your health. Design: not enough hand holds, leaving spaces where you can only rely on your feet as you move down the center aisle while the bus seems to be taking off and landing over potholes. I have over thirty years of ballet training behind me, and I have been thrown around in Van Hools more times than I care to admit. Imagine how elderly and mobility impaired passengers feel; the door opening switch doubles as a “stop requested” bell, and can be activated by the driver, or not, you don’t know, and apparently even the drivers get confused, as they have closed the door on me before I was completely off the bus. The hydraulic shutting system is powerful, let me tell you. And whatever you do, don’t sit on the seat located over the left rear wheel-well. It will burn your buns with whatever evil fire burns under there, the only relief provided by the airborne moments of the bounciest ride in town. When I wait at the bus stop, I literally pray for a bus from the old fleet, and I think I’m not the only one.

Maurice Charrière

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bHS Education

Editors, Daily Planet:

I was born and raised in Berkeley. I attended Berkeley High and have seen first hand the lack of resources the school has to offer. How can you teach students when they do not have the resources to learn? A school’s job is to educate it’s students, and that means providing them with the tools to learn.

Why is it that the school built a new football field, when some classes didn’t have enough copies of their textbooks or even enough desks for it’s students? It baffles me that the management decides to focus on making the school look good on the outside, when it is truly a disaster on the outside.

It is time for City of Berkeley to stop focusing on issues like the UN and the Marine Recruiting and start focusing on educating their citizens. I thought education was what Berkeley was all about. We have a first rate university in our city, yet our local education system is barely functioning. It’s time to step your game up and teach the students what they deserve by giving them an education.

Jacob Horn

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noise nuisance

Editors, Daily Planet:

I am writing concerning Use Permit #08-10000047 which has been filed with the City of Berkeley. This permit is for a new development on the roof of 1625 Shattuck in Berkeley to establish a wireless facility for AT&T, including eight antennas and four equipment cabinets.

I spoke at the Zoning Adjustments Board (ZAB) meeting on Oct. 8 because I am concerned that the noise of the four cabinets will exceed the limit allowed by Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC). The applicant for the permit, when I shared my findings, did not consider my concerns but rather dismissed them.

The Design Review Committee has recommended that the “ZAB should look carefully at the noise produced from the cabinets since so close to residences behind.” AT&T retained a consultant, and reported, “As a ‘worst-case’ scenario, the consultant calculated that the four cabinets would generate up to 41 dB at the nearest neighboring residences, which are approximately 50 feet away.” In their report they write, “This noise level meets the City’s nighttime noise standard of 45 dB by 4 dB.” This reading was verified by a second firm.

BMC §13.40.050 (Exterior noise standards) denotes that between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. the noise limit is, indeed, 45 dB, which was referenced in the staff report. There is one thing they neglected to mention. We all know that familiar constant hum of electronic equipment. Well, BMC §13.40.050.B (Correction for character of sound), sets higher standards for noise that “contains a steady, pure tone such as a whine, screech, or hum.” For such noise, the standard limits are “reduced by five dB,” making the limit 40 decibels, not 45 as cited in the staff report.

This proposed project, as is, would create a development that would be in violation of BMC §13.40.050.B, exceeding the allowed noise limit. Plus, the reading of 41 dB was done at residences 50 feet away. What about residents who live on the second floor of 1625 Shattuck? This use permit has not been approved yet. Please join me when this permit is being considered again by the ZAB, and hold them accountable to Berkeley Municipal Code and the noise standards of this city.

Justin Cannon

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Hassan Fouda

Editors, Daily Planet:

Hassan Fouda’s commentary, Oct. 8, is a classic ranting diatribe, full of high pitched, emotional fervor but devoid of accurate, complete facts. I am certain that others will “Fisk” all of his factual inaccuracies. Through a mix of half truths exaggerations and personal attacks, Mr. Fouda intentionally seeks to create a distorted, misleading impression of the real situation in Gaza. This simply isn’t journalism, it is political advocacy.

Its not surprising when a committed advocate of a political position engages in distortion and puffery in order to advance their ideology. Its what we’ve come to expect from ideologues. There is however no excuse for a news outlet of any type to provide a forum for this type of one sided, inaccurate “hit piece.”

Those statistics referred to the number of children killed by both Israelis and by Palestinians, in the period starting from the second intifada, on Sept.29, 2000, to the present. The disparity is shocking: 1,487 Palestinian and 123 Israeli children, a ratio of 12 to 1.

She then goes on to justify the deaths of these Palestinian children, but as a Jewish American, I have to ask: really? The death of any child is a tragedy. When an Israeli soldier puts a bullet in the head or neck of a child, we should be shocked and appalled,not standing behind that soldier in justification. We should be outraged. And we should be committed to putting an end to these horrific acts once and for all.

Robert Kanter

Emeryville

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HeaLth Insurance

Editors, Daily Planet:

I’m an 18 year old student at UC Berkeley and I have no health insurance. I have not had health insurance in years and I know that if I were to ever get cancer I would go back to where I was born, Turkey, to receive medical care. Why? Why would I go back to the country I came from for such a basic care?

My family and I came to the United States because we believe that it is the best country in the world, it is a nation where anybody can succeed if they work hard. My father became a dentist here after we lived on unemployment for 2 years and now I am paying for my own education with no financial aid.

But when I grow old and get sick I will be left for the dead by my nation. Insurance doesn’t pay past a certain amount for any chronic illness but we pay insurance companies our whole lives. We are expected to go to war, I have friends in Iraq and Afghanistan but our nation will not help us in our dire need for health care. By the time I and your children grow up Medicare will be bankrupt and we will be left in a land which cannot provide us with the most basic need of health care while any other nation will provide their citizens.

I only ask all of you, why should Americans suffer?

Zahide Atli

•

Health CAre

Editors, Daily Planet:

Ralph Stone’s letter describing how America’s Fortune 500 corporations secretly take out “dead peasant” insurance on their employees leads one to a horrible and plausible conclusion. These corporations are fighting health reform because they don’t want Americans to have better health care. They profit directly from their employee’s early demise. Worse than “cynical,” worse than “criminal,” this privatization of health care has putrefied civil society.

Bruce Joffe

Piedmont

•

Obama’s Nobel PRize

Editors, Daily Planet:

I raise money for an international charity in an outdoor area of heavy foot traffic. The white people nearby are either very rich, or very poor. I have a huge sign complete with pictures of starving children, and before the Obama election, people stood at my sign, applauded the effort, and perhaps donated, before walking on. After Obama was elected, the unemployed white men would shuffle forward, stop and stare at the sign, look a bit dejected, then disgusted, probably thinking, “My skin’s not brown enough, I’m not poor enough. Another club that don’t want me.”

There’s a perception among poor whites that Obama doesn’t want to govern, but rather, win some sort of international beauty contest at their expense. You know. Another party where white people aren’t invited. In reality, Obama has neither ceded territory, nor signed a treaty that diminishes America’s influence one bit. Obama has not handed over any military bases to the nations that house them, nor has Obama cut deals that make it easier to import foreign goods. In fact, Obama nearly started a trade war in support of American tire makers. Honestly, Obama’s never been a Culture Warrior for The Left, never been the type of leader that won’t sleep until every race and tribe feels represented at every table. That’s just not been his thing.

But politics is perception, and working-class white people are convinced Obama is working for everyone but them. That’s why I thought it was hilarious when the Nobel Committee Chairman said that the Peace Prize went to Obama because of “realpolitik.” Realpolitik, huh? By giving Obama this prize, the Committee probably increased Rush Limbaugh’s audience by a good ten percent.

Thanks a lot, guys.

John Cerino

•

The Audacity of Hype

Editors, Daily Planet:

It’s a morbid joke, right? Barack Obama? Nobel Peace Prize?

Not since Henry Kissinger was given “the Peace Prize” in 1973 has the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize involved such a sad and tragic irony.

Between now and delivering his “Peace” Prize acceptance speech, Obama will be sending drones to bomb mostly collaterally innocent people every week—in their homes, marketplaces, villages, and even wedding parties. He will be continuing to operate George ‘Dubya’ Bush’s practically beyond-the-law, rendition-torture gulags—notoriously, Gitmo and Bagram. He will be expanding the technological advancements, types and potential “usability” of U.S. nuclear weapons—while supposedly also being awarded “for his attempts to curb nuclear proliferation”. And, he will be, upon their every request, militarily resupplying a racist apartheid state, Israel, with cumulatively billions of dollars worth of cluster, DIME and phosphorus bombs, no matter how many fleeing families upon whom that state will use those execrable terror weapons.

The Nobel Peace Committee must still be high on the ‘Obamalade’ to make such a blatant mockery of what the Nobel prize for peace(!) should stand for. Or, should they now call it the Nobel “Peace Is War” Prize?

Joseph Anderson

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Haiku for nasa

Editors, Daily Planet:

NASA shot the moon

And the moon would not respond.

Let’s apologize.

Carol Denney

•

nasa’s experiments

Editors, Daily Planet:

Why do scientists think they have the right to experiment with our natural weather and atmosphere without our knowledge or permission? As one example, how many people know about NASA’s recent launch of a rocket to create an artificial aluminum oxide dust cloud at the outermost layers of Earth’s atmosphere, Project called CARE (Charged Aerosol Release Experiment). For critical analysis of this event go to News with Views., U.S. Navy to conduct Massive Atmospheric Experimental Tests, by Rosalind Peterson.

Many current and ongoing weather modification programs listed by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) each year are changing the climate in many regions of the United States. Most Americans have not been made aware of these programs. For more information go to californiaskywatch.com.

Come to a film series, “Exploring the Causes of Climate Change” and learn about an unfactored wild card in climate change theory. Hear scientists describe the technology used by the Military to heat up the ionosphere to manipulate the weather using electromagnetic waves from the HAARP facility (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Project) in Alaska. Films show every Wednesday evening in October at the Humanist Hall in Oakland. www.humanisthall.org

Vivian Warkentin

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Norwegian wood

Editors, Daily Planet:

there’s a mole in the white house kitchen

slippin’ birch ash in obama’s food.

it ain’t meant to poison him,

just turn his skin to norwegian wood.

Arnold Passman

•

Insurance COmpanies

Editors, Daily Planet:

Our system works better for insurance companies that it does for the American people. Tens of millions of Americans have no health insurance, living one accident or illness away from total financial disaster. Hundreds of millions of who Americans have insurance live with the constant worry that they might lose it if they move, change jobs or lose their jobs—or that their insurance company might cancel their plan when they get sick.

President Obama’s plan will simply make insurance work better, by holding the insurance industry accountable. Under the President’s plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to:

Deny coverage based on a preexisting condition.

Drop or weaken coverage when you get sick.

Place cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime.

For the tens of millions of Americans without insurance, President Obama’s plan will offer quality, affordable choices. The President’s plan calls for the creation of a new insurance exchange, where individuals and small businesses a can compare plans and buy the one that works best for them. President Obama believes that one of the options available in the insurance exchange should be a public insurance option. He believes a public option is a way to create more competition and ensure every American has an affordable choice.

We are closer now than ever to enacting comprehensive reform. An unprecedented coalition of doctors and nurses—and a huge percentage of the American people—are behind President Obama’s plan. It’s time to finish the job and pass real reform.

Brad Michaels

•

Public Option

Editors, Daily Planet:

Anywhere from 60 to 70 percent of Americans being polled say they want a “public option” as part of health care reform currently being considered in Congress. On the other hand, almost all Republicans are on the record as wanting to kill not only any public option, but in fact, any health care reform bill.

Without a public option there is no competition in the health insurance industry. Without competition the public losses and Congress has wasted everyone’s time.

The GOP has a huge problem and there is a good reason why Republicans are so determined to defeat President Barack Obama’s health care plan. They know that tens of millions of people will benefit from the new health care coverage and will therefore become supporters of the Democratic Party for decades to come.

This has happened with Social Security, Medicare and civil-rights legislation. Democrats proposed these programs and have received the political benefits many times over.

Passage of health care coverage for all Americans will be the GOP’s Waterloo.

It shouldn’t be complicated to build a new animal shelter. In 2002 the voters of Berkeley passed Measure I, the bond measure to fund the construction of a new shelter. Finding an appropriate site has been far harder than persuading the voters of the validity of this cause.

And if you listen to the city management, plans for the new shelter at 1 Bolivar are proceeding quite nicely, thank you very much. Demolition of the boarded-up building at the site, originally scheduled for last April, may start soon; joint plans with the Parks Department for the “touchdown plaza” at the base of the pedestrian bridge over I-80 are currently on hold because of a lack of state funding, but hey, don’t worry; and the bids for the new shelter construction are due to come in any week now.

A great team of architects, faced with a site which is, to put it mildly, restrictive, have produced a design that most agree is better than what we currently have. But that’s not a high bar to cross. When people involved with the project say “we’ll manage” when talking about the flaws of the site and facility even before ground has broken, you know that something is wrong. At what point in a public project is it too late to stop and say “what are we doing?”

Built in the 1950s, Berkeley’s city animal shelter is a squat cinderblock building on Second Street, with two rows of dog concrete kennels, the chain-link fencing stained over years with the saliva and piss of thousands of dogs, and with a drainage gutter running the length of the 60 kennels down which the detritus of a night of confinement runs into an inadequate drainage system which, after a heavy rain coughs the brown muck back into the kennel area.

Built originally to just hold animals before being killed, it has no medical treatment room; the laundry room does duty as the euthanasia room; the volunteer training room is the staff kitchen; and the tiny lobby is often packed with people trying to adopt an animal, looking for a lost pet, paying for a license, or having a heated argument with an animal control officer over the legitimacy of a citation. A man with a crate of newborn kittens jostles a woman who has found a dog abandoned in the park; a 50-pound dog meets another by accident as one dog is walked in and one dog out at the same unfortunate time. In the noisy kennels, families are enthusiastically searching for their new companion, while volunteers are walking dogs past their eager and sometimes kennel-crazy cell mates whose bodies slam up against the chain-link fencing as a cacophony of barking reaches crescendo again and again.

The cat room is tiny, with disease control impossible if a sudden virus were to appear. Once full, and when the overflow hut is filled with shy cats, or mama cats and their newborn offspring, frantic phone calls are made to animal rescue groups and the decision about which to kill causes staff the kind of distress you hope an animal shelter staff does feel when faced with these options.

But the building was just the symbolic and visible festering boil on the policies and philosophies of the past. Evidence of the old oven, long unused, where the dead bodies were cremated is still visible today on a blackened ceiling. Just over 10 years ago, 1,350 dogs and cats (60 percent of intake) were killed at the Police Department–run Berkeley Shelter in one year. It was, in the words of an employee, “Berkeley’s dirty little secret.” Eleven years ago a group of us marched into Mayor Shirley Dean’s office and said “what the hell are you all thinking?” I looked across the table at Police Chief Dash Butler and said “The police shouldn’t be running an animal shelter,” and to his credit, he said “I agree.”

In the 10 years since the city transferred the shelter administration to civilian control–Berkeley Animal Control has become Berkeley Animal Care Services and has, not without pain, become the animal shelter with the lowest rate of euthanasia in California and one of the busiest community resources in Berkeley, with hundreds of visitors, adopters and volunteers a week. And the shelter is the recipient—along with its community nonprofit partners—of an accolade only awarded a handful of times in the country, the declaration of Berkeley as a true “no-kill” community, where every adoptable and treatable animal (and many who would be deemed neither in other shelters) leaves the building alive. But we could not do it without our local animal rescue group, Home At Last, which rescues an average 250 animals from our shelter a year—well over 10 percent of all our intake—and the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society (BEBHS) which takes another 150.

The troubling reality is that the new shelter may not meet the needs of the agency as soon as the ribbon is cut.

Every other new shelter being built is increasing kennel numbers while ours is reducing the number of dog kennels from 60 to 49; municipal shelters all around the area are literally drowning in animals, kill rates are rising, disease is increasing. And if we think we are immune, we are making a mistake. The continuing economic crisis causes the family pet to be one of the first casualties of financial stress.

Increasing numbers of animals in need of medical care are being surrendered or abandoned in these tough economic times. Last month alone, 15 dogs with contagious parvo virus were surrendered to the Oakland Shelter. People are struggling financially and not vaccinating their animals.

Yet our new facility fails to include one of the primary selling points of the bond measure—a low-cost well pet clinic for the residents of this community. There is not one single low-cost vet service in Berkeley, and the BEBHS Hospital closed to the general public this year. In an era of shrinking revenues, of diminishing private giving, the mood among municipal and private animal welfare organizations is to consolidate, share resources and cut waste, we failed to do what we most needed to do—develop a joint “campus” of animal welfare with our local community partner, the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society.

And we can’t expand. With the shelter scrunched into a corner of a smallish site with the freeway on two sides, the Toyota property on a third side and a park development on the fourth, we are trapped, and hemmed in by an EBMUD easement which the Humane Commission did not know about when the vote was taken to approve the purchase, and upon which we cannot construct. The site, in a flood zone, needs to be raised 18 inches and deep foundation piers need to be sunk to adjust for the fact that is landfill, and a proposed third story was deemed impossible because of the weight concerns.

There is no back entrance for service vehicles, so that potential conflicts with pedestrians, bicycles, skateboarders and wheelchairs heading to and from the pedestrian bridge over I-80 are inevitable. And while there is the benefit of being able to take the dogs on leash walks to Aquatic Park—kenneled dogs need desperately to play and train off-leash—there is just one small triangular shaped dog run attached to the new building. The partially open air kennels back on to the freeway so that the noise, smell and debris from the freeway will intrude all the time.

What happens at this little facility on Second Street is generally regarded as just “an animal issue.” How wrong this perception is. Just as the most vulnerable utilize the public health system, so do the most vulnerable humans utilize the city animal shelter more than the wealthy.

Is it too late to change course? It should never be too late to get it right. Possible solutions include keeping our current site and rehabilitating it as an intake and medical center, revisiting the idea of building alongside the Berkeley East Bay Humane, or purchasing an entirely new larger site. The political pragmatism of “we just need to get this thing built” is just not the approach we should take. Not in Berkeley.

A mere 14 months after China dazzled the world with spectacular opening and closing ceremonies for the XXIX Olympiad it threw a comparably stupendous birthday party for itself. Official festivities lasted eight days and although it was not an invitation-only affair it drew very little attention in our dominant media. I am writing to share the thrill of seeing what I filched from the Internet and from television’s fringe channels.

Two years of teaching English in the hinterlands (Wuhu in Anhui Province, 1982-3, and Liaocheng in Shandong Province, 1986-7) put me in close proximity with China’s culture and customs. For many of my college students I was the first “round eyed, long nosed, devil” they’d ever seen.

Chinese customs are to some extent the inverse of ours, e.g. surnames before given names, dinner guests in Anhui show respect for their host by arriving early. Chinese culture intersects with ours in strange, some might say, irrational ways, e.g. the government mandated that schools abandon Russian and teach American in preference to British English, every educated Chinese loves western classical music. In Liaocheng a teacher who lived across the road from me played Beethoven’s Fur Elise every morning, week after week for an entire semester.

The whole world knows about China’s astonishing economic growth; annual GDP running between 6 and 10 percent year after year. In 1982 my students accepted China’s place in the third world; students today will have none of it. My personal experience with this “great leap forward” is highlighted by the fact that the Grand Canal, the oldest—begun in the 5th century B.C.—and longest—about 1,100 miles—man-made waterway in the world, connecting Beijing to Hangzhou, a dust-dry ditch 27 years ago as it passed through Liaocheng had become a fast flowing river carrying boat traffic when I visited in the spring of 2004.

I took the train from Jinan to Beijing for National Day, the 37th anniversary, and walked a very long block to Tiananmen. Instead of an organized celebration I mingled shoulder-to-shoulder in a sea of people.

Tiananmen is the biggest city square in the world, so big that it is not possible to appreciate its size standing anywhere on it. If you walk from one side to the other at strolling speed it will take over thirty minutes. If properly marked off with chalk lines Tiananmen could accommodate 80 simultaneous football games each with adequate space for coaches and benched players.

For the 60th birthday spectacular spectacle Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, was indeed marked off—for a parade route with viewing accommodations on the north, Forbidden City side. The parade included elements to delight eyes and ears, formatted and presented in a manner that stirred the imagination into the realm of stupefying disbelief.

Voice over commentary said that a hundred thousand people had practiced for weeks and would participate, marching, chanting and singing, in the parade. They passed by in gender segregated groups, 10 by 10, 20 by 20, 20 by 40, 10 by 60 etc., each fitted out in colorful uniforms, red, blue, yellow, orange, green and earth-hued military camouflage.

From the side line, position yourself above the heads of the marchers and see a row of 20. In ordinary walking one’s head bobs up and down with each step but in parade-military marching there’s no head-bobbing; drill sergeants make sure the formation bobs as one. So, see white caps and white belts in lines as straight as two laser beams moving smoothly as if on wheels or undulating on a calm lake. See 20 right legs move as one, 20 right arms perfectly synchronized; everyone the same height—caps forming perfectly spaced dots in a plane rectangle or square. See a stack of 20 identical profiles, equal arm length, arm swing, chin angle, hair cut. Don’t be surprised to hear the voice-over say that eyebrows and fingernails had to meet exact specifications. “Sorry son. You picked up 10 pounds since we selected you. Turn in your uniform and go home.” So identical is the movement of each marcher to all others that computer graphics popped into my head—I was, after all, looking at TV. The 20 by 40 block I see is actually a single beautiful person in gorgeous uniform duplicated and formatted in rows and columns by a computer program 799 times.

What I saw on television and the Internet and what I am trying to convey is necessarily affected by what I saw at the same place over two decades earlier: back then a sea of people in ordinary dress milling about contrasted today with wave after wave of uniformed, disciplined, perfectly synchronized performers, on the small screen.

Of course, I only saw what producers put on the Internet and TV. My wife was told of a relative who took her 10 year-old son to Beijing to see the parade. The kid was not just disappointed and frustrated, he was downright angry. He never wanted to go to Beijing again. He couldn’t see the parade, he said. All he could see was people.

I do not know how long the parade lasted. How long does it take for nearly a hundred thousand marchers at two measured step per second to pass a given point? Add to that a dozen or so floats and the customary display of awesome military hardware, tanks, missile launchers, airplanes.

A major highlight of China’s birthday festivities took place on the penultimate day. A lavish production of Turandot—estimated cost $17.57 million—took place at the Beijing National Stadium, the Bird’s Nest, the site that housed track and field competitions and where the stunning XXIX Olympiad opening and closing ceremonies took place.

For the opera the stage occupied an arc on the circumference; it reached a height of thirty feet and the width of the sloping stage-floor looked to be three times that. It was still not big enough because the voice-over told me there were a thousand singers in the chorus and I could see many of them singing from ground level.

The choice of Turandot epitomizes China’s strange cultural intersects with the west. Puccini never visited China. He adapted the story from an ancient Persian fable. The title character is a beautiful princess and China has never in millennia of recorded history, dynasty after dynasty, designated Emperors’ daughters as princesses. Finally, the orchestra in this over-the-top production was conducted by an Italian. On the occasion of its 60th birthday China seemed to be showing the world that great music transcends parochial niceties and suffers no diminution because of factual miscues.

Afterthought. I wonder what’s happening to those tens of thousands of colorful uniforms. Surely, the men and women students in the parade did not take them home. I cannot imagine anyone wearing such eye-catching costumes on the streets of Shanghai, Wuhu or Liaocheng. Be on the lookout for them on sale in costume shops in New Orleans next Mardi Gras or in Rio for Carnaval.

The U.S. is determined to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. President Obama has said he will “do everything” to stop this. U.S. officials have repeatedly said that no options will be taken off the table, implying that war against Iran is an option. The U.S. has repeatedly claimed that Iran is using its nuclear energy program as a cover for obtaining nukes. We hear this refrain despite the lack of any real evidence and despite the U.S.’s own National Intelligence Estimate and various statements of the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) that there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

The U.S. is currently using various weapons against Iran, including propaganda, diplomacy, sanctions, and actual war preparations and threats. While the U.S. is currently emphasizing diplomacy, the possibility of war should not be discounted. The rush job that is now underway to produce a 15-ton bunker-buster bomb is an indicator that the U.S. is preparing for war if it believes it is necessary to achieve U.S. goals.

The Pentagon has set a target date of Dec. 2009 for the production of this latest weapon, three years ahead of the previous production schedule. This bomb reportedly can penetrate 60 meters underground before exploding, making it an ideal weapon to destroy Iranian underground facilities. In addition to the development of the bomb, it is also reported that the Pentagon is adapting the bomb bay of the B2a bomber for the actual delivery of the weapons. The Democrat-run Congress funded this project in the 2009 war budget. Congress advanced $68 million to accelerate the production of the weapon.

In its funding request to Congress the Pentagon stated, “The Department has an Urgent Operational Need (UON) for the capability to strike hard and deeply buried targets in high threat environments. The MOP is the weapon of choice to meet the requirements of the UON.” It further said that the request was endorsed by CentCom, which has military responsibility for Iran.

While these military preparations are a warning to Iran and an attempt to strengthen the U.S. negotiating hand, they also serve to increase the ability of the U.S. to actually launch an attack against Iran. If diplomacy, threats, sanctions, and other weapons fail to achieve U.S. goals, war could follow.

The U.S., Germany, Russia, China, and the U.K., began negotiations with Iran on its nuclear enrichment program on Oct. 1. These nations demanded that Tehran open up its nuclear facilities and programs to international inspection. The production of this bomb is meant to back up this demand with the threat of military attack. The U.S. has also threatened to tighten economic sanctions against Iran.

The Pentagon has confirmed the development and intent to deploy the weapons. On Oct. 7, military press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters, “It is under development right now and should be deployable in the coming months.” Morrell stated the bomb is designed “to defeat hardened facilities used by hostile states to protect weapons of mass destruction.”

The U.S. recently accused Iran of building a uranium enrichment facility near Qom, Iran and attempting to hide this new facility from the IAEA. The fact that this facility is not yet completed and that Iran notified the IAEA by letter about the construction the week before the U.S. announced its “discovery” have been conveniently ignored by U.S. propagandists. Iran has already agreed to IAEA inspections of the new plant construction this month.

Does Iran have a secret nuclear weapons program? The reactionary Iranian regime is not above lying about such a program. But there is no concrete evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran at this time and Iran has no nukes.

But even if the Iranian regime is developing nukes, this is no reason for us to back the U.S. rulers in launching an imperialist war against Iran. We have no interest in supporting our reactionary ruling class against the reactionary ruling class in Iran. The U.S. will not be going to war to free the Iranian people who it helped repress for so long under the Shah of Iran. If it goes to war it will be because Iran poses a major obstacle to U.S. objectives and dominance in the strategically key Middle East-Central Asian region. Control of this region—a military-strategic crossroads and “pivot” between Asia, Europe and Africa, with 80 percent of the world’s energy reserves—is considered vital to continued U.S. global supremacy, and crucial to the very functioning of U.S. capitalism-imperialism.

Iran is a strategically located country with large energy reserves. In 1979 after a quarter century of dictatorial rule by the U.S. supported Shah, who was installed by a CIA coup, Islamic theocrats took power. They have formed a relatively coherent state, an Islamic fundamentalist theocracy and pole of opposition in conflict with the direction the U.S. wants to take the region. Iran has helped strengthen Islamic fundamentalism which has become a big problem for the U.S. Iran’s agenda in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere conflicts with U.S. plans.

Iran is now highly polarized and its leaders are under great stress. Millions of Iranians justifiably hate the regime and there are divisions among Iran’s rulers. Mounting international pressure is also contributing to destabilizing the theocratic regime. In this situation the U.S. is maneuvering to gain advantage and to pursue its own hegemonic designs. All this may result in pushing the rulers in Tehran to move forward with their nuclear program.

Neither side of the tense and dangerous confrontation between U.S. imperialism and the Islamic Republic of Iran represents anything positive for the world’s people. War between the U.S. and Iran will only bring massive suffering to the people of Iran and of the world. We in the U.S. have a special and urgent responsibility—beginning with opposing aggression by the U.S. and its allies in any form—whether sanctions, threats, or military attacks. War against Iran must be opposed and no U.S. excuses will justify such a crime.

Kenneth J. Theisen is an Oakland resident and a steering committee member of World Can't Wait.

I agree with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (BAMN) that Berkeley does not need another a charter school (“Activists Protest City’s Proposed Charter School,” Oct. 8-14). Besides the paramount issue that a BUSD charter school would “codify separate and inferior education” for black and Latino students, a BUSD-sponsored charter school will tap into limited public resources in terms of facilities, parcel taxes and state money intended for Berkeley public school students. A charter school is open to any student in California. In the current economic environment BUSD public education is already being short-changed. Why siphon off scarce resources?

BUSD Director of Facilities Lew Jones reportedly said that a new facility for a charter school could be built using $1.8 million in unallocated bond money in BUSD’s facilities budget. Why should the District use bond money to fund a charter school facility when Berkeley High is chronically short classrooms that should have been built with the last bond money? In fact, Lew Jones reported to the BUSD last spring that all of the $116.5 million Measure AA bond money intended, in part, to build a classrooms at Berkeley High was gone and that much needed classroom space at the Berkeley High would need to be funded from a future bond measure. Let’s build classrooms at Berkeley High before any charter school.

Moreover, Berkeley already has one charter high school—CalPrep, run by a partnership between Aspire public schools and UC Berkeley—sponsored by the Alameda County Office of Education. BUSD rejected sponsoring CalPrep last year. In April 2008 Superintendent Huyett told the CalPrep folks that BUSD did not want any direct involvement in any charter school activities.

Alameda County Office of Education approved the CalPrep charter school in June 2008. If Berkeley students wish to attend a charter secondary school, CalPrep is up and running at St. Joseph the Worker school in Berkeley, and any Berkeley student may apply.

Although I am not in favor of charter schools in Berkeley, at least Aspire Public Schools had a track record in terms of successfully establishing and running schools that improved student achievement. On the other hand, the organizers of REALM, led by the principal at B-Tech, BUSD’s continuation school, do not appear to have a track record in terms of successfully leading a secondary school. According to the California Department of Education website, none of the students at B-Tech tested proficient in either English language arts or math in 2009. B-Tech enrolls only about 120 students and has a graduation rate of 54 percent. According to the 2009 Accountability Progress Report presented to the BUSD board at the last meeting, B-Tech’s API declined 106 points. The school board should be concerned about the lack of academic progress at B-Tech, but adding a charter school is not the answer.

If the 2020 Vision Planning Team recommends another charter school or alternative program, the BUSD board should reject such a proposal. Berkeley does not need another charter school or alternative program. Scarce resources should be efficiently focused on providing adequate facilities and education for the 16 schools already run by BUSD. Let’s start by closing the achievement gap in BUSD’s own schools.

A decade ago downtown developer Patrick Kennedy regularly explained to the Zoning Adjustments Board that we needed to approve his use-every-inch projects because it was just that kind of density that produced Paris. That argument disappeared once Kennedy started building seven-plus story buildings; Paris, except for a relatively small and contained office park, is comprised almost exclusively of six-story or smaller buildings.

Now it’s Manhattan. Suddenly you can’t spend 30 seconds at a public forum, in person, online, or in print, without someone telling you how Manhattanites don’t own cars, have wee little carbon footprints, can’t contemplate living anywhere else, and generally enjoy a style of living all Americans should seek to emulate.

Comparisons are odious, the proverb runs. I don’t think it’s strictly true. This Sunday’s New York Times had an article in which a doctor said that patients regularly described the progress of E.coli poisoning as “worse than childbirth,” and that was pretty illuminating, even for a guy. But when comparisons are used in public debate, it’s almost always an attempt to replace real discussion with soundbites.

Berkeley is not Manhattan. Move the financial center of America here, open a few hundred museums, give us a half dozen intensive ethnic neighborhoods with great cuisines, surround us on all sides with huge waterways to forever constrict the available real estate, and wait a few decades until that stew creates a private-car–less infrastructure; then we’ll talk.

Berkeley citizens interested in the fate of our downtown have some real questions that call for some real old-fashioned answering:

How carbon-friendly is it to tear down usable buildings and replace them with the much higher ones called for in the City Council’s plan? For buildings higher than six stories, developers have to abandon wood-supported construction and go to a totally different and much more intensive structural system that requires steel throughout.

All the new residence buildings in downtown—The Berkeleyan, the Fine Arts, Gaia, the Bachenheimer, even the much-touted Library Gardens—are populated by students. Who are the people who are actually going to want to—or could afford to—live in downtown 20-plus-story towers?

What is the council majority’s evidence that tall buildings are the sine qua non of fabulous nightlife? And how will we get downtown to enjoy it without using our cars?

Where will we get the money for the tens of millions of dollars in downtown improvements called for in their plan if the instructions to staff for determining fees is to first of all protect the developers’ profits? Land-Use Policy 8.3: “When establishing provisions for new fees and financing strategies, consider how fees and extractions may discourage development, so as to make these provisions consistent with the intent of this plan.”

That’s the kind of information we need; everything else pales in comparison.

While UC administrators blame the state government in Sacramento for recent cuts in funding, the top echelons of UC are part of the same web of political nepotism and short-sighted anti-tax idolatry damaging the State’s public services and infrastructure.

In the wake of the historic Sept. 24 UC protests for public education, the UC administration has moved swiftly in a coordinated campaign to coopt public outrage by pointing fingers at the dismal budget situation in Sacramento. A consistent statement about the protests—in UC spokesman Steve Montiel’s words, “the true source of their frustration is in Sacramento”—has been issued in forums such as NPR, the New York Times, Regent meetings and University emails by top officials like UC President Yudof, UC spokesman Peter King, and Berkeley’s spokesman Dan Mogulof and Chancellor Birgeneau.

But blaming only Sacramento is misleading.

First, several members of the Board Regents—the 26-member body running the UC system—are themselves part of state government in Sacramento—including the Assembly Speaker, the Governor, and the Lieutenant Governor —or have served in key positions in the Governor’s office or in state government, or are close friends with such folks. Regent Reiss advised the Governor’s election campaign, and Regent Kieffer,who was the Governor’s wife’s lawyer, co-chaired Schwarzenegger’s campaign. Kieffer denied nepotism, saying “it’s better if the governor knows a good deal about the person he or she considers for appointment.” Regent Gould advised the Governor and helped broker the 2004 budget in which a Compact was made to lessen reliance on public financing. Schwarzenegger and his Regent friends want lower taxes and smaller government—as evident in the recent report on tax reform by Schwarzenegger’s former money manager Paul Watcher, also a former Regent.

Second, some Regents lobby against raising taxes and public spending, and directly or indirectly contribute money and support to electing governors or CA assembly members who will de-fund public services like the UC. New Regent Makarechian spearheaded a Republican strategy group and his elite real estate company gave over $100,000 to Schwarzenegger, and Regent Zettel gave thousands of dollars to the Lincoln Club’s efforts to reduce state taxes. Because these UC Regents shape the UC administration, UCOP has publically come out against measures that would have raised public revenue, such as the Tuition Relief Now Bill (a 1 percent tax on millionaires) and the California Higher Education Endowment Bill 656 (a small tax on oil), and measures to cut costs, such as caps on administrative salaries. So while Yudof recently suggested his critics “write to the Board of Regents, because they set my salary,” Regent Makarechian seems to believe we should raise executive salaries because they “are well below the market” and “we have to be competitive.” In sum, to blame Sacramento is disingenuous when the UC is governed by wealthy anti-tax CEOs and partisan insiders appointed with minimal oversight by conservative, multi-millionaire Governors.

Third, the legislature doesn't allocate more funds to UC partly because they and the public don't trust UCOP and the Regents because of repeated controversies, most evident in recent scandals over compensation, bloated administration, and lab governance, not to mention BP and Oaks controversies. For example, the person heading UC Berkeley’s government outreach efforts is Linda Williams, who was caught up in a pay scandal—tate senator Romero called it “an outrage”—in which UC admitted misleading the public. Perhaps not the best sort of person to inspire confidence from tight-pocketed legislators. Legislators are also not inspired by the fact that Board President Regent Gould and Regent Schilling both were top managers of now insolvent banks, Wachovia and Golden West, heavy involved in toxic mortgages and credit default swaps—and Gould is leading the UC Commission on the Future.

Fourth, why haven't the Office of the President, the Regents and UC executives been lobbying the state legislature harder these past years? Sure Yudof has scrambled this year to make 20 visits and have 20,000 letters sent, and students hold an annual Sacramento lobby conference. But our public university must have much more of a consistent public presence that goes beyond vague calls for support and gets into the nitty gritty of budget allocation, as does, for instance, the prison lobby. This has not happened partly because some UC management is not skilled in such, and partly because many of those who are so skilled view some degree of privatization as inevitable and/or beneficial. For example, UCOP’s External Relations division has only a few ‘fact sheets’ online—it’s most recent news story is from August 2008!. And while Berkeley Chancellor Birgeneau celebrated BP’s $500 million pact with UC Berkeley, he said nothing of their $3 million contribution to blocking proposition 87, which would have used small oil taxes for long-term state funding for public research and education on sustainable energy.

We need to get beyond the UC vs Sacramento debate, and examine and reform the pervasive undemocratic relationships of finance and cronyism that are dragging down the UC, state public education, and the California dream—some folks at ucdemocracy.org have been working on these deep roots of the crisis. Until we address these sorts of forces—the same sorts that are blocking progressive national health care reform – no amount of protest or administrative restructuring will do much. Important changes stirred by social discontent have been made before in state and UC governance, notably in 1974 on term lengths and representation; the time is ripe again.

Hillary Violet Lehr is a UC Berkeley graduate and co-founder of the Phoenix Project for UC Democracy.

As a UC Berkeley alumnus and emeritus CSU faculty member (Long Beach), I strongly support the Oct. 24 Mobilizing Conference to Save Public Education and urge all UC, CSU, community college, and K-12 students, workers, teachers, and their organizations to participate in this movement.

As a congressional candidate of the socialist Peace and Freedom Party (District 10, 2008), I would remind everyone that, ultimately, the solution to California's budgetary problems lies in the socialist transformation of the global economy, based on the principles of peace, democracy, equality, and ecology, and led by the workers of the world organized as the ruling class. I do not suggest that students and workers simply wait for The Revolution, however. Instead, I urge them to challenge the existing system with the following transitional demands:

• Roll back all fees to 1954 levels (Even though we had a capitalist economy when I enrolled back then, fees totaled $45 a semester at UC Berkeley, less in the CSU and Community Colleges).

• Cut bloated administration salaries to the level of faculty and staff. (Does anyone really believe the university is a better place because Mark Yudof got paid $828,000 in 2008? Or that Coach Jeff Tedford got $2.8 million?)

• Reform the California state budget by measures such as the following:

A. Impose an oil severance tax of 25 percent on all oil produced in California (comparable to the 25 percent imposed on oil companies by former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin).

B. Develop a split-roll tax system, protecting Prop. 13 tax levels for homeowners while requiring businesses and corporations to pay their fair share of state taxes.

C. Create a State Bank of California similar to the state banks of North Dakota, the Canadian Province of Alberta, and the state banks of China and India.

D. State budgets to be passes by majority vote of the state legislature.

F. Federal bailout of state and local governments comparable to the bailout of banks.

• End all wars in the Middle East, shut down the war machine, put the Merchants of Death out of business, abolish all nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Hassan Fouda in his Oct. 8 Commentary about Gaza tries to show that he cares about human being, about children and civilians. Nice intention.

Then why would he not mention in his article that Israelis made absolutely impossible and unprecedented efforts to avoid collateral damage: they called to houses before bombing and asked civilians to leave?

Can you or him please update me about who else in the history of humankind was doing the same—call to the enemy side and ask civilians to leave the site? Nobody. Never.

Can you imagine Soviet troops bringing medicine to German general Paulus who was surrounded in Stalingrad? Israelis delivered medicine and food to one of the most dangerous terrorists, Yasir Arafat, whose hands were covered with blood, who is a real gangster.

Israel was doing this. Why? Because they are trying to use human language towards people who definitely do not understand human language, their ethical system is different. I think Israel was deadly wrong.

Israelis always try to save life, life is important in Judaism. They save lives even of their enemies, sending them to Israeli hospitals. What are Arabs doing in these cases? We all remember what Arabs did to three unarmed Israeli reservists. They cut them in pieces and joyfully danced on the bodies shaking hands covered with blood and keeping in hands human liver. Of course, Hassan is not mentioning this.

Can you please ask him to mention some facts when Arabs would save Israelis? As I see life is not important at all in Islam, if they send their kids to kill other kids on discos and restaurants, if they stoned their women, decapitate them, cut hands of children who stole a bagel.

If Fouda tells us they are freedom fighters, come on. Ask him to visit doctor-psychiatrist ASAP. Why Fouda is not saying a word about who and why used women and kids as human shield which is real reason for them to be killed? Who kept them on the roof of school, hospital? Who taught them to carry suicide attacks? Who brainwashes them every second in school, on TV, everywhere?

Since when this is not war crime from Arabs against Arabs? Nobody justifies killing of children and innocent people. And nobody should justify using them as human shield.

If he would really think about stopping the madness, Hassan should think about this: stop teaching hatred in Arab schools toward Israel and Jews. If Arabs would like to have piece, they had to accept Israel’s existence.

But they don’t accept Israel as state. In this case what are we talking about? Israel has all rights and all oblications to defend her citizens. My understanding is that Israel is not using this right.

Arabs don’t want piece, they don’t need state, actually they have it—it’s Jordan. “Palestinian nation” is creation of the Soviet KGB, nothing more. There were no such nation. And no such state can be created.

They don’t want jobs, life, state. If they would like normal life, they would have it long time ago. Look at this simple fact: when Israel left some villages at West Bank, they leave behind some green houses, factories. Guess, what happened to them? They were destroyed. If Arabs would like to have jobs and life, they would use it, but why should they work, if they have enough money for war?

All they want is war, because they get money more than anyone else in the world (per capita). And they use it basically for war and guns. If they would destroy Israel, then they will start looking for another target, as they always did being in different states—and this is the reason why many Arab nations don’t want them.

I understand what Hassan Fouda is doing. He is rewriting history, he is picturing Israelis as monsters. Every civilized person who is able to read can find that this is absolute lie. He doesn’t say a word about Arabs killing their own people and then blaming Israelis for it. Arabs made complete staging of huge funeral and graves in Janin and had been caught on that. Now history repeat itself. Why do you allow Hassan to picture Israelis like monsters on your pages? Don’t you understand that if Israel’s goal would be destroying Palestinians it would be reached long time ago? Israel gave them guns, trained their police. All Israel wants is to have her right to exist to be accepted by neighbors. Is it really too much to ask about? Is it too much to ask for the state which made heaven in desert?

But the most important question is not for Hassan who is poor product of Arab brainwashing machine. The main question is for you: Why do you allow to use your newspaper to publish absolute lie about Israel army? Aren’t you as journalists supposed to learn and to double check before publishing so brutal lie?

In his discussion of “What’s at Stake in the KPFA Board Election?” Matthew Hallinan starts out on the right track: there really are important substantive differences between the group he’s part of—the Concerned Listeners (CL)—and just about everyone else involved in the election, including not only the ticket I’m on—Independents for Community Radio—but also the other two slates in the race for the Local Station Board.

But in seeking to explain these issues, Matthew sets up a straw man that only obscures the real nature of the contest. Critics of the current CL majority and the status quo it supports, he tells us, “propose what is essentially an all-volunteer KPFA [with] no professional management and no paid staff."

With all due respect, this is sheer fantasy. No one on the Independents for Community Radio list nor anyone else involved in the current election has made any such proposal, directly or indirectly. All the candidates recognize the need for paid management and staff. I for one wish we had stronger, more professional management—i.e., managers with training and/or pre-KPFA experience in running a media outlet.

The question that actually divides us is not whether we need management, but how management should relate to other elements of the KPFA community. In the view of Independents for Community Radio and other critics of CL, the station’s traditions and professed values, not to mention the letter and spirit of the Pacifica by-laws, require that listeners and unpaid as well as paid staff should have a real voice in major decisions.

In contrast, Concerned Listeners, in the name of “professionalism,” believe the station’s managers should make all major decisions by themselves. They have consistently supported the current management’s policy of dismantling, disempowering, or disregarding every representative body that has evolved over past years at the station. Some examples:

• Management unilaterally dismantled the Program Council, a decades-old body that brought together representatives from management, paid and unpaid staff, the board, and community representatives to evaluate existing programs and new program proposals. Now top managers alone make all decisions about programming, without consulting anyone else—such as the current plan to eliminate the morning “Music of the World” show. There’s no longer even a procedure for anyone to submit a proposal for a new program. The by-laws oblige the Local Station Board to ensure that programming decisions are made in “a fair, collaborative and respectful manner.” Can anyone seriously claim that that’s the case today?

• Management unilaterally “de-recognized” the Unpaid Staff Organization, the body that defends the interests of the people who produce about 70 percent of KPFA’s programming. Yes, UPSO hadn’t been functioning effectively for several years, but that apparently didn’t bother management - they “derecognized” the group only when it started to get its act back together. When both KPFA Local Station Board and the Pacifica National Board passed resolutions directing management to reverse this “derecognition,” KPFA management defied them for months, giving in only in the face of direct orders from Pacifica’s interim Executive Director.

• On the LSB itself, the Concerned Listeners group has used the majority it has maintained for three years to impose a do-nothing policy. After management called the police into the station to deal with a minor, non-violent dispute with unpaid programmer Nadra Foster, and the police brutalized Foster and hauled her off to the Santa Rita jail on five felony charges, we in the minority sought to have the board investigate the incident with an eye to developing policies that could prevent a repetition; CL refused to put the issue on the agenda. (To this day, the board has not held even one moment’s discussion of this deeply troubling incident.) On another occasion the minority, concerned about staff complaints of unfairness and unclarity in policies applied to them, as well as repeated complaints of sexual harassment (and expensive lawsuits as a result), requested copies of any written personnel policies in effect at the station, but CL went along with management’s refusal to turn over such policies—even though reviewing personnel policies is surely a basic function of a non-profit board.

This year, CL’s response to declining listenership, a large financial deficit, and serious staff morale issues was to reduce the frequency of board meetings from the traditional monthly schedule to bi-monthly. They claim this will allow time for more work to be done in committee—an argument that might sound reasonable, except that the board under their control has no functioning committees!

The CL majority has also gone out of its way to minimize communications between the LSB and the wider KPFA community. The by-laws oblige the LSB to “conduct ‘town hall’ style meetings at least twice a year, devoted to hearing listeners views, needs and concerns.” Under CL control the board has simply ignored this requirement—no such meeting has been held in years.

And the CL member the majority elected to serve as secretary of the board—normally a capable person—has not managed to post either agendas or minutes of board meetings on the KPFA website since November 2008.

Altogether, these realities are what Independents for Community Radio and other critics of the status quo mean when we talk about top-down, corporate-style management. Matthew Hallinan asks why seasoned progressive activists like CL would support such a model. That’s a good question. I wish he’d answered it.

What, concretely, do the rest of us propose as an alternative?

• The Program Council should be restored, so all elements of the KPFA community can work together to preserve and enhance what’s best in the station’s current programming and bring in new approaches and new voices to replace what’s gone stale.

• The LSB, which is charged by the by-laws with the duty of evaluating the station’s general manager and program director, must make clear that respecting the letter and spirit of the by-laws is a requirement for these jobs. That means, among other things, that the general manager should attend LSB meetings regularly and use her time on the agenda not just to boast about fundraising successes (the current pattern), but to get input and feedback from the board and the community about major policy decisions.

• The board itself should meet at least monthly, probably more often, rotating through all parts of the KPFA listening area. It should make complete, comprehensible agendas and minutes readily and promptly available. It should have functioning committees to (among other things) increase outreach and develop a strategic plan for enhancing KPFA’s online presence, which falls farther behind the technological curve by the month. And it should live up to all of its by-laws-mandated obligations.

That’s some of what we mean by our slogan, “Putting the community back in community radio!”

If you haven’t voted yet, you have until midnight tonight (Oct. 15). Please cast your top votes for me and others endorsed by Independents for Community Radio.

Henry Norr is a candidate for re-election to KPFA’s Local Station Board.

“The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.”

That was the conclusion of a letter to the New York Times from a group of concerned Jews regarding Menachem Begin and his record of extremism before his visit to the United States in 1948. It was signed by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, among others. We cannot be sure what those individuals would say about former Prime Minister Olmert’s upcoming visit to San Francisco, but it seems likely they would express grave concern.

Some facts are presented here as to why we will protest Olmert on Oct. 22 as a war criminal for his actions as prime minister.

Olmert’s attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 caused massive destruction as Israeli forces destroyed whole civilian neighborhoods. Even water treatment facilities were attacked despite the prohibition against targeting objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. Statements by Israeli military officials were made indicating that the destruction of civilian infrastructure was indeed a goal of Israel’s military campaign designed to press the Lebanese government and the civilian population to turn against Hizbollah. Deliberate attacks against civilians to advance a political goal is the classic definition of terrorism. We hold Olmert accountable.

The long siege on Gaza intensified during Olmert’s term. It has left in its wake malnourished children and an ongoing humanitarian disaster. It is the economic strangulation of a whole people imposed on them as a response to their choice of political representation in 2006—although the roots of this economic siege begin long before that. This siege has been declared by multiple human rights and humanitarian organizations as illegal and unjust. We hold Olmert accountable.

Finally, there is the horrendous war on Gaza. The facts are laid out in great detail by the Goldstone Report. The Israeli military, under the direction of Prime Minister Olmert, committed multiple war crimes against the whole people of Gaza, in the process killing over a thousand people, including hundreds of young children, and destroying infrastructure and thousands of homes that mostly are yet to be rebuilt, due in large part to the cruel sanctions placed on Gaza by the Israeli regime. We hold Olmert accountable.

These are a few salient facts regarding Ehud Olmert and his crimes. We urge all concerned to take action.

Justice Goldstone has said that the Middle East suffers from a “culture of impunity” that allows these crimes to continue, saying that “Overlooking justice only leads to increased conflict and violence.” We believe this culture of impunity must end, and must end now. On Oct. 22 at 6 p.m., as Olmert makes his speech to those gathered inside the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco, we will gather outside in Union Square with the message that we demand accountability to international law. We will be silent no more.

Jim Harris is a long-time antiwar activist and resides in the Bay Area.

Columns

“We deeply regret” are words that almost always end with something terrible. They were uttered by German Defense Minister Franz Joseph Jung in the wake of a Sept. 4 air strike that left upwards of 100 Afghans dead. He followed it with a boilerplate that invariably makes such apologies suspect: “We had reliable intelligence that our soldiers were in danger.”

Jung had nothing of the sort, but the minister’s deception had less to do with the military’s standard instinct to lie, than with the arithmetic of Germany’s federal elections.

The Afghans, most of them farmers from a local village, were incinerated to make sure that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDP) and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) did not overly suffer for their support of the war.

The tale is a chilling one.

According to Der Spiegel, at 8 p.m. on the night of Sept. 4, a German intelligence officer in the northern province of Kunduz took a call from Afghan security forces indicating that the local Taliban had hijacked two fuel tankers. His commander, Col. Georg Klein, asked for air reconnaissance, and a U.S. B-1B long-range bomber spotted the trucks stuck in the sand of the Kunduz River. The B-1B sent pictures, but apparently they were grainy, dark and hard to read.

At 10 p.m. a local Afghan informant told Klein there were no civilians around the vehicles, but lots of Taliban, including four leaders. At a little past 1 a.m., two F-15 fighters showed up.

Under the General Rules of Engagement and Standard Operations Procedures—the military loves to wrap mayhem in the language of maintenance manuals—the trucks could not be attacked. First, there were no NATO troops on the scene. Second, a single informant is not enough to initiate an attack. And third, it was not a “time sensitive” target, that is, one that was going somewhere. The trucks had been stuck for four hours.

But Klein called for an air strike anyway, even after the F-15 pilots asked him to confirm that German forces were involved and that the tankers posed an “imminent threat.” Assured on both points, the planes released two GBU-38 radar-guided bombs, each with a 500-pound warhead. The target dissolved in an enormous fireball.

From all accounts Bundeswehr Col. Klein is no gung-ho heir of the Wehrmacht. He drinks tea, goes to the opera and worries about his men. When a local Afghan boy was shot at a roadblock, he personally apologized to the family.

So what made him launch an attack that violated every rule of engagement?

“Klein knew that in a past incident the insurgents had detonated a tanker truck in Kandahar, killing dozens of civilians,” writes Der Spiegel. “He had also received visits from a number of leading politicians, from Merkel and Steinmeier as well as Defense Minister Franz Joseph Jung (CDU) and his predecessor Peter Struck (SDP). Klein knows that they fear nothing more than an attack on German troops shortly before the upcoming parliamentary elections.”

According to the German paper, Afghan informants told Klein back in August that the Taliban were planning an assault on the German camp using trucks. But Klein should have known that it was unlikely that such an attack would be tried with huge, slow moving fuel tankers.

Indeed, Mullah Shamsuddin, the commander of the Taliban forces who seized the trucks, had no intention of using the trucks as suicide bombs. “Fuel tankers are far too impractical in terrain like this,” he told Der Spiegel in a phone interview. “We simply planned to drive them to Chahar Dara and unload the fuel there. We can always use supplies.”

Instead the trucks got bogged down and the Taliban recruited local farmers—many at gunpoint—to try to pull them out of the sand. The locals also brought fuel cans to fill. “We knew the fuel was stolen, but we were forced to go there,” says a young farmer, Mohammed Nur. When the bombs hit, he was badly wounded. His two brothers died.

When the story broke, the Germans went into full spin mode. Defense Ministry flak Captain Christian Dienst told the media, “According to our knowledge at present, no civilians were present,” and then scolded the press for speculating while sitting “in their warm chairs in Berlin.” The Ministry also leaked a false story that Klein had used reconnaissance drones and that there was a second intelligence source.

But as the evidence piled up, the Ministry’s denials began to unravel. Interviews by the group Afghan Rights Monitor found that the dead included 12 Taliban members and 79 villagers. Soon the Defense Ministry found itself under assault not just from its own media, but also from its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Almost before the fires went out on banks of the Kunduz River, out came the long knives.

The United States, struck first. U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal arrived at Kunduz with a Washington Post reporter. When the Germans objected, McChrystal said the journalist was just collecting background material for a book. But on Sept. 6 the Post printed a story blaming the whole thing on the Germans and using quotes from the meeting. German commanders angrily accused the United States of “deliberately leaking misinformation.”

The French and the British piled on next. The bombing was “a big mistake,” said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, and British Foreign Minister David Millband called for an “urgent investigation.”

Afghan President Harmid Karzai blasted the attack as a “major error,” adding that McChrystal had apologized and said that he had not “given the order to attack.”

The underlying resentment among the NATO allies is beginning to surface. When Labor MP Eric Joyce recently resigned from the cabinet because he could no longer support the war, he leveled a broadside at other NATO countries. “For many, Britain fights, Germany pays, France calculates, Italy avoids.”

Even some in the United States have begun to rail at what they see as a lack of commitment by NATO. U.S. Rep John Murtha, the powerful Democratic chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told The Cable that while “The American people are supporting this [the war]” the Europeans are not. “The Europeans are not doing a damn thing.”

As of Sept. 17, the United States had lost 830 solders in Afghanistan, Britain 216, Canada 130, Germany 38, France 31, Denmark 27, Spain 25, Italy 21, and the Netherlands 21. The overall allied losses in the war are 1403.

Deaths among Afghan civilians, according the United Nations, have risen 24 percent over last year, one third of them from air strikes.

The allied gang up was a shock to the Germans, who have long touted their expertise in Afghanistan and sharply criticized other NATO nations for being indifferent to civilian casualties. “German bashing” was suddenly in vogue. As one diplomat told Der Spiegel, it was “Schadenfreude against the eternal know-it-alls.”

The massacre at Kunduz has suddenly brought the war home to the Germans. The parties that collaborated in sending the troops—the Green Party, the CDU and the SDP—have long tried to keep Afghanistan off the radar screen. Jung won’t use the word “krieg” (war), Merkel has yet to attend a soldier’s funeral, and Steinmeier has suddenly embraced a “10-step program for Afghanistan,” as if a solution in that war-torn country was akin to drying out at a health spa.

Following the attack, the Left Party, the only party that opposes the war, called for a major anti-war protest at the Brandenburg Gate.

In the recent elections, the Left Party increased its share of the votes by 3.7 percent, the Greens by 2 percent, and the SDP took a shellacking, dropping 11.1 percent. The only winner on the right was the Free Democratic Party that increased its vote total by 4.9 percent. Merkel’s CDU went down 1.4 percent.

In the end, Kunduz may be the tipping point for NATO, the incident that shattered the myth that Afghanistan was about digging wells, building schools and bringing peace.

“Simple villagers were killed. They were not Taliban,” Dr. Saft Sidique of Kunduz Hospital said. “The German air strike has changed everything. The sympathy for the Germans is gone. Would it be any different for you if your homeland was bombed?”

It’s an old saying that there is no better recruiting sergeant than an air strike, a truism on display at a meeting of the Kunduz provincial government shortly after the attack. A number of people there praised the air strike, but at the end of the gathering Maulawi Ebadullah Ahadi of Chahar Dara, a town where the Taliban rule, raised his hand: “Brothers, each of those killed has a hundred relatives who will then fight against the government. Bombs sow the seeds of hate.”

Though I was in the Bay Area in October of 1989, I missed Loma Prieta. The shaking part of it, that is.

I was living in the South when the Bay Area Rapid Transit was built, and after I returned, I rode it all around the East Bay, from Richmond to Fremont. For the longest time, however, I avoided taking BART to San Francisco, because of the completely irrational fear of being caught on the train under the bay during a major earthquake. But life being as it is, under the bay on BART was exactly where I was when the largest Bay Area earthquake of my lifetime struck.

I was working at a small San Francisco law firm and the four partners were all season-ticket Giants fans so, of course, they all took half a day off that day to go to the World Series. Around 4:30, I decided to take off as well. If I hadn’t, I would have been stuck in San Francisco without transportation back home to the East Bay, as were so many other workers. I caught the last East Bay train out of the Embarcadero Station before the earthquake hit.

I may have felt Loma Prieta, but if I did, I didn’t know it at the time. It was a crowded commuter car and I was standing up sandwiched between a pack of other commuters, hanging on to the overhead rail to keep from falling into someone’s lap. BART probably gets up to its highest speeds in the cross-bay tube, so that it normally rocks and sways in its passage, and perhaps some of the side-to-side movement we felt was the earthquake itself. If so, none of the passengers seemed to notice anything unusual. I certainly didn’t.

We pulled out of the tunnel and up into the West Oakland Station as usual. And that’s when everything began to change.

We sat at the station with the doors open for somewhat longer than the normal stop time—again, something not unusual for a BART ride—but as the wait began to stretch out, impatient passengers began to look around and talk among themselves about what the delay might be. Finally, the train operator came on the train’s intercom and said something to the effect that regular BART passengers know that slight train delays are normal, but there was something different about this one. He said he couldn’t get anyone in the BART system on his radio or his car telephone, and said that we would have to wait at the station until he could get some information. Either then or shortly afterwards, he informed the passengers that we could get off the train and wait on the platform if we’d like. He’d keep the doors open and give us plenty of notice before he was ready to leave again.

It was an unusually warm autumn day—“earthquake weather,” folks later used to call it—and we milled around on the station, enjoying the sun, some of us leaning on the rail and looking out over the scenery, trying to make the best of it. Over to the northwest, I recall seeing a distinctive, thick black smoke cloud hanging low over the buildings, but I thought little of it at the time, believing it to be the discharge from one of the area’s many factories. It only had significance for me later when I saw it replayed over and over again on television broadcasts in the next several days, identified as the fire from a tanker truck smashed when the Cypress Expressway collapsed.

We had not been out on the platform long when a passenger—probably trying to catch the Giants-A’s World Series game on a portable radio—came running through the crowd shouting, excitedly, something like “There’s been an earthquake! There’s been an earthquake!” He started giving out details from what he was hearing on the radio as he came close to where I was standing. It was 7-point-something, and a freeway was down, and the Bay Bridge had collapsed.

A great buzz went up through the crowd, and many of us moved towards the western end of the platform, where you could get a good look at the beginnings of the bridge. There was the span, the same as ever, rising out of the West Oakland flats. But the news had left the platform in some unsettlement, and people kept looking around a decidedly quiet Seventh Street for some confirmation, one way or the other. The street below was quiet and, if I remember correctly, decidedly empty. Certainly nothing appeared unusual.

All of that changed some time afterwards—I’m not at all sure how long—when a BART worker, possibly a station agent, came vaulting up the stairs from the ground-floor station area below, clearly shaken, announcing that there had been a major earthquake, and that all the passengers must immediately exit the upstairs platform. The BART worker did not panic and the evacuation was orderly, but that was the only time during the Loma Prieta experience that I was worried. There were 10 commuter-crowded BART cars of passengers on the platform, all of them trying to file down through—what is it, two stairways?—and while I was waiting my turn to go down, I kept thinking that we had been up there on the platform about a half an hour, and I could have easily walked down those stairs anytime I wanted, but now I was probably going to die waiting in line at the top of those stairs when the aftershock hit and took the platform with it.

Downstairs there was still no panic, but it was purely chaotic. I went outside in front of the station to see about getting transportation, and there was a great crowd at the bus stop, filling the sidewalk and spilling out into the street. A few buses pulled up, filled with people, and took off, while the crowd at the bus stop—if anything—appeared to grow larger rather than diminish. Figuring there was little hope there, I decided to walk up Seventh Street to downtown to try to catch something there.

A couple of blocks up Seventh from the BART Station there used to be an onramp to 880 South (it was later torn down as part of the demolition of the Cypress Expressway). A crowd of passengers had moved up there from the station—most of them white—and some had formed a barrier line across the onramp entrance, and were asking the drivers of upcoming cars for rides to the south. I thought to myself at the time that they had probably never set foot in West Oakland in their lives, and were probably more frightened about that prospect than they were, apparently, about getting into complete strangers’ cars.

They needn’t have been frightened about West Oakland. Walking through the neighborhoods downtown, there was a stunned, almost reverential silence among the crowds who had come out into the sidewalks and streets and were waiting to make sure no more shaking was forthcoming. Seeing the look of a great, shared experience that was in their eyes, that was the first time I began to feel that I had missed something while riding under the bay, something I could never come back and capture, and certainly never experience myself.

Later, as I got into the downtown area, the atmosphere became more festive, as cafe and restaurant owners kept their doors opened to patrons, and downtown office workers appeared to be getting progressively louder and drunker and more celebratory as they waited for transportation home.

I have wondered, if I had known about the Cypress collapse while I was up on the BART platform, what I would have done in response. Almost certainly I would have walked over that way, out of the kind of curiosity that sent me into the field of journalism. And once there, I am sure I would have joined in the general rescue effort (on the ground, not climbing up on the expressway platform) as so many other civilians did. If so, my view and experience of Loma Prieta would have been far different.

But for me, I felt the Great Earthquake of ’89 as the little boy under the nighttime sky who is told, “look, there goes a meteor,” and looking up, finds that it has already passed away.

PERSONAL NOTE: From time to time, I had worked under contract with a local public relations firm to produce press releases for various East Bay social and community events. This work has not conflicted with my column or my reporting for the Berkeley Daily Planet. Last week, I was asked by the public relations firm to produce a release for a community event sponsored by the office of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums. I did not contract directly with the mayor’s office, and will not report upon the event, and do not believe the work compromises my position as a reporter who periodically covers the Dellums administration. However, I acknowledge the possibility that some of my readers may feel differently and judge my work accordingly and, thus, in fairness, this disclosure.

Lots of rain already! Good news vis-à-vis fire season, maybe bad news for our oaks. Sudden Oak Death (SOD) watchers worry that if this is an El Niño winter with lots of rain, the disease already devastating some of our keystone oak species will spread farther and faster.

Phytophthora ramosum, the disease organism, is one of those nasty critters that taxonomists find interesting: It’s not a bacterium or fungus, but a member, maybe, of a “kingdom”-level taxon that includes brown algae and slime molds. Whether this group really composes a fourth “kingdom” or is just a handy designation for what isn’t animal, plant, or fungus—there’s the academic fun of current debate.

Meanwhile, back in the woods, conditions are test-tube ideal to spread a disease whose sturdy little spores travel by water, including little splashes and dribbles. They also need water to wake up and live, infect, and reproduce.

SOD moves downhill with water, and also down to the lowest parts of leaves when it infects them. By the time you see wilting, browning, opportunistic fungus clusters, or bugs, the tree’s doomed.

The organism was doubtless introduced with some ornamental plant or other in the nursery trade. The trade had set up safeguards and maybe those will work, but this zebra’s out of the barn already and it kills most of the wild trees it infects, as far as we know.

Its zebrahood is part of the problem. The usual advice about tree diseases, to keep trees healthy enough to fight them off and recover, doesn’t work with this one because it’s hitting a naïve population. Remember how so many of the First Peoples here died of diseases that Europeans had adapted to survive—measles, assorted poxes? Like that.

Matteo Garbelotto notes, in fact, “Sometimes the most robust trees become most attractive and susceptible; they produce more carbohydrates for the Phytophorum to live on. The trees we see surviving are the scraggly ones.

“But we can’t stop keeping a susceptible tree happy. What we have to do is choose the trees we want to try saving, and by March or April, when most infection is happening, make those trees as invulnerable as possible.”

There are things that help, and they’re relatively accessible to ordinary people, and non-toxic to the rest of the world. Oak-lovers need to start on these early. There are also lots of quack remedies out there, no surprise, and some are expensive. Garbelotto’s UC lab has been trying out everything they’ve heard of, and most just don’t work.

His team is conducting “SOD blitzes” to find out where the disease exists now, mapping it on-line, and giving free hands-on workshops to tree-owners and professionals.

Admission is free, but registration is required. E-mail your name, preferred date, and affiliation (if applicable) to kpalmieri@berkeley.edu, or call 847-5482. Register ASAP, as registration is on a first come-first serve basis, with a 20-person limit per session.

Next workshop: Sudden Oak Death Syndrome — what to look for and what to do.

Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin (1828-1909) was one of California’s most storied individuals. Crossing the plains by wagon train in 1853, Baldwin quickly made his name as a shrewd entrepreneur. By his early 40s, he had become a fabled Comstock millionaire. In the mid-1870s, he opened San Francisco’s legendary Baldwin Hotel and Theatre on the corner of Market and Powell Streets, current site of the Flood Building.

Baldwin was America’s most celebrated horseman. He owned nine derby winners, four of them raised in his stables. Between 1875 and 1880, he acquired over 35,000 acres of Southern California ranches, including Rancho Santa Anita, his home ranch. Combined with properties in San Francisco and Los Angeles, these holdings made Baldwin one of the foremost landowners in the state.

On Rancho Santa Anita, Baldwin raised 33,000 sheep, 3,000 head of cattle, 500 horses, many hogs and dairy cows. His vineyards yielded 384,000 gallons of wine and 55,000 gallons of brandy. The orchards included 500 acres of orange trees and 3,000 walnut trees. The nursery comprised one million fledgling trees.

Married four times and involved in many tempestuous love affairs, Baldwin fathered two legitimate daughters, born almost 30 years apart. The younger, Anita (1876-1939), was born to his third wife, Jane Virginia Dexter, a child-bride who died in 1881.

Like her father, Anita was impetuous in love. On Jan. 5, 1892, five days shy of her 16th birthday, she secretly married George W. Baldwin on a tugboat outside the Golden Gate. The 25-year-old groom was her father’s cousin, employed as a clerk at the Baldwin Hotel. On March 21, while Lucky Baldwin was away at the Santa Anita ranch, the young couple went to Shasta on their honeymoon. The news traveled like wildfire across the nation, and the papers had a field day with headlines such as “Love Laughs at Luck” (St. Paul Daily Globe) and “Lucky Baldwin’s Daughter Anita Mated Against His Wishes” (New York Times).

A week later, the radiant couple returned home—not to the Baldwin Hotel, where the bride’s family lived, but to rooms in the home of a “private family” on McAllister Street, near San Francisco’s new City Hall, where the groom had secured employment in the county clerk’s office. George expressed confidence in his ability to provide for his wife, while the San Francisco Call speculated on the prospect of her father’s forgiveness: “It is thought a reconciliation will follow in time, although it will hardly be immediate. Mr. Baldwin is a man of strong resolutions, but his most vulnerable part is said to be his affection for the youngest daughter.”

The reconciliation was not long in coming. On April 13, the San Francisco Call announced, “The old millionaire fell ill several days ago, and when the girl learned that he was sick she went to his bedside to wait upon him as she used to. The reconciliation between them is said to be complete, and the old man will also forgive George for carrying off his favorite.”

The couple moved back into the hotel, where George was again employed. In June 1893, Anita delivered twin boys who died shortly after their birth. Lucky Baldwin had predicted that the marriage would not last a year. It went on for several more but was rocky from the start.

The Baldwin Hotel was destroyed by fire on Nov. 23, 1898. By then, the thrifty George had accumulated enough savings to purchase a string of racehorses, which he took to the East Coast on Jan. 1, 1899. Although George eventually came back to San Francisco, he showed no desire to return to the conjugal home. Anita divorced him in October 1900 on grounds of desertion.

No sooner was she free of one marital entanglement than she fell into another. Her new innamorato aroused Lucky Baldwin’s ire just as fiercely as the previous one, since this time Anita committed the sin of falling in love with a Democrat.

She met Hull McClaughry (born 1870), a Harvard Law School graduate and politician, during the 1898 election campaign. “It was no uncommon sight to see Mrs. George W. Baldwin an interested spectator at all the Democratic meetings at which McClaughry spoke in the interest of the party at large and incidentally for himself as a candidate for the office of Justice of the Peace, a stepping stone to possible future political honors,” reported the San Francisco Call.

Anita went so far as to attempt a conversion of her father to the cause, showing him Hull McClaughry’s campaign poster and asking for his support. A staunch Republican, old Baldwin was outraged. Relating the incident to his cronies, he summed up, “Well, I just tore that picture in small bits and gave her to understand that I did not want any Democratic ads around where I was and what’s more made it plain to her that she had better overlook the original, too, or there’d be something doing.”

The daughter promised to obey. In May 1900, her father traveled to the gold fields of Nome, Alaska, determined to recoup the millions he lost in the Baldwin Hotel fire. For the second time, Anita took advantage of his absence to elope. Remembering the seasickness of her 1892 tugboat wedding, she vetoed a floating venue for this round. The couple traveled by train to Carson City, Nevada, where a Justice of the Peace married them on Oct. 26—exactly 20 days after Anita’s divorce from George.

The new bridegroom practiced law and eventually found some favor with his father-in-law, for in July 1903, when Lucky created the town of Arcadia on the Santa Anita tract, McClaughry was one of the five insiders elected to the town’s first Board of Trustees.

The McClaughrys’ first child, Dextra, was born in San Francisco in 1901. Their second, Baldwin, was born in Berkeley in 1904. They were not listed in the city directory until 1908, when their home was an undistinguished Colonial Revival box at 2401 Ward St.

In January 1904, Hull McClaughry was offered the post of secretary to San Francisco Postmaster Arthur G. Fisk. By mid-March, he had become General Superintendent, and in January 1905 attained the office of Assistant Postmaster, a position he held until 1910. This post had previously been held by President McKinley’s aged uncle, who accepted a subordinate position in the money-order department to make way for McClaughry. Fisk clearly favored McClaughry, for they went on to become law partners.

By 1908, it was time to seek a more fashionable address, and the McClaughrys hired contractor John Armstrong to build them a two-story house at 17 Plaza Drive, in the new Claremont tract. The cost, $3,650, was very modest for the home of a millionaire’s daughter.

Lucky Baldwin died on March 1, 1909, leaving an estate of over $20 million. Anita inherited half of it, including the Santa Anita ranch. As a result, the McClaughrys began spending much of their time in Arcadia, where Hull managed the estate.

Still, this marriage, too, foundered. In July 1913, Anita filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty. “She testified that she and her husband quarreled so often over the cost of living as a result of his economical ideas that her health became impaired,” reported the New York Times. She undertook to pay Hull $300,000 as part of the divorce settlement.

Celebrating her freedom from economy, Anita proceeded to a San Francisco jeweler, dropping close to $225,000 on a string of pearls. Having yielded the estate management to Arthur Fisk, The frugal Hull McClaughry kept the house on Plaza Drive for several years before returning to his hometown, Galt, Calif. His ex-wife and children quickly dropped his surname, reverting to Baldwin. Both Dextra and Baldwin faithfully followed in the footsteps of their mother and grandfather, marrying by elopement.

Arts & Events

“Bobbin Lace: The Taming of Multitudes of Threads” at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles, 2982 Adeline St. Exhibition runs to Feb. 1. LacisMuseum.org

City of Berkeley Civic Center Art Exhibition Works by Berkeley artists on display Mon.-Fri. from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Martin Luther King Civic Center, 2180 Milvia St., through Dec. 11. 981-7533.

“Domestic Disturbance” Intergenerational group of artists on the difficulties of balancing public and private life. Opening reception at 5 p.m. at Worth Ryder Gallery, 116 Kroeber Hall, UC campus. Exhibit runs to Oct. 31.

Todd Laby: Images from “Brink” detailing his physical and psychological recovery from a serious surfing accident. at 5 p.m. at The LightRoom Gallery, 2263 Fifth St. Exhibition runs to Nov. 6. 649-8111.

Thad Carhart reads from his historical novel “Across the Endless River” of frontier America in the 1800s, at 7:30 p.m. at Mrs. Dalloways, 2904 College Ave. 704-8222.

Amy Dean discusses her new book “The New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement” at 12:30 p.m. at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, IRLE Building, 2521 Channing Way. 642-9187.

Shotgun Players “This World In A Woman’s Hands” The story of the WWII Victory warships and the African-American women who built them, with live acoustic bass by Marcus Shelby. Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 5 p.m. at The Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby Ave., through Oct. 18. Tickets are $18-$25. 841-6500. www.shotgunplayers.org

“Dementions” A Halloween and Day of the Dead art exhibit. Opening reception at 7 p.m. at Eclectix Gallery, 10082 San Pablo Ave., El Cerrito. Runs to Nov. 29. www.eclectix.com

READINGS AND LECTURES

Stewart Brand on “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto” at 7:30 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way at Dana. Tickets are $40, includes autographed copy of book. www.brownpapertickets.com

“Exploring De Staebler Through Movement” A movement workshop with Muriel Maffre in conjunction with the exhibition “Steven De Staebler: The Sculptor’s Way” at 11 a.m. at The Richmond Art Center, 2540 Bartlett Ave., Richmond. Free. 620-6772. www.therac.org

“The Self as Super Hero: Exchange and Response” A joint project with ArtEsteem and CCA faculty. Reception at 3 p.m. at Oliver Art Gallery, California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland.

FILM

Home Movie Day from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Film inspection and check in at 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808.

Sonic Harvest 09 A festival of new music for voices and instruments Sat. and Sun. at 7:30 p.m., pre-concert discussion at 6:30 p.m. at Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. Cost is $15-$20. 654-8651. http://sonicharvest.org

“Berkeley in Conflict: Eyewitness Images” featuring never- exhibited works by photographers John Jekabson, Dan Beaver, and Lydia Gans. Reception at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. 848-0181.

PlayGround “Futurism Revisited” Short works from new and emerging playwrights at 8 p.m. at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St. Tickets are $15. 415-704-3177. www.PlayGround-sf.org

“From A to B and Back Again” with artist Candice Breitz at 7:30 p.m. at 160 Kroeber Hall, UC campus. Sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media. 495-3505. atc.berkeley.edu

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen “Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity” at 7:30 p.m. at FCCB, in the sanctuary, 2345 Channing Way at DanaTickets are $6-$15. www.brownpapertickets.com

“Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth” A panel discussion of the graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, with art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna at 5:15 p.m. in room 100, Genetics and Plant Biology building, UC campus. 642-0143.

“A New Deal for the East Bay: Excavating the Buried Civilization of the Great Depression” with Gray Brechin at 7:30 p.m. at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St. Tickets are $15, $40 for the series. 644-9344. berkeleyheritage.com

“Tragos” A film by Antero Alli at 8 p.m. at Grace North Church, 2138 Cedar St. Cost is $6-$10. www.verticalpool.com

READINGS AND LECTURES

Michael Lewis in Conversation with Dacher Keltner in a benefit for the Greater Good Science Center, at 7:30 p.m. at Zellerbach Playhouse, UC campus. Tickets are $25. www.greatergoodscience.org

Deepak Chopra “Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New Self” at 7:30 p.m. at FCCBin the sanctuary at 2345 Channing Way at Dana. Tickets are $35, includes and autographed copy of book. www.brownpapertickets.com

Milvia Street 2009 Publication celebration with art exhibit at 6:45 p.m. and readings by contributors at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center St. scoleman@peralta.edu

“30 Days Later” Art exhibit planned in just one month with works by artists associated with Berkeley City College, at 5 p.m. at The Space, near High St., 4148 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. www.thespaceoakland.com

Music Business Seminar sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound St. Cost is $25-$70. 415-775-7200. www.calawyersforthearts.org

David Sax reads from “Save the Deli” at 4 p.m. at Saul’s Restaurant and Deli, 1475 Shattuck Ave. www.saulsdeli.com

MUSIC AND DANCE

San Francisco Early Music Society “Strings of the Streicher Trio” with Elizabeth Blumenstock at 7:30 p.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 Colleges at Garber. Tickets are $10-$25. 528-1725. www.sfems.org

Samantics performs music for movies and television, including Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini and John Barry, at 3 p.m. at All Saints Chapel at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, 2451 Ridge Rd. Tickets are $10 at the door.

So Lord Byron burlesqued the nurse’s speech that opens Euripides’ most famous play, anachronistically camping up tragedy beyond pathos.

Ragged Wing Ensemble is working in a similiar vein with their new (and original) piece, So Many Ways to Kill a Man, playing at the Willard Metal Shop Theater off Telegraph Avenue.

Ragged Wing has old torch songs of heartbreak and betrayal playing before their show. Yet So Many Ways to Kill a Man is a kind of riff on the Oresteia and the related tragedies about the House of Atreus in Greek myth, touched up a little noirishly here and there, and vaudevillized by this talented group, who understand what trouping’s all about.

It’s not exactly Mourning Becomes Electra—set by Eugene O’Neill in New England, post-Civil War, structured like the Oresteia—but it’s getting there. Before four screens, spaced across the back of the stage, with a slash of blood-red paint running continuously across them, Amy Sass (who scripted So Many Ways) poses as Clytemnestra, a femme fatale, flicking her cigarette lighter shut with a click! after lighting up; Anna Shneiderman (who wrote the songs) alternately huddled or exalted in an Oriental robe as Cassandra, captive Trojan princess and doomed prophetess; and Keith Davis, in what look like desert fatigues with combat ribbons and a red beret, as world-weary Agamemnon, survivor of the 10-year siege, returning to die at his wife’s hand in Argos, prescient yet unflinching, ready for the knife he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia with.

One quick series shows Ragged Wing at its signature best: Sass as Clytemnestra recounts as Davis and Shneiderman pantomime the sacrifice—when, with a quick leap, Shneiderman sits on Davis’ shoulders, miming drawing back a bow, while both recite in unison Artemis’ edict at father immolating his child—then the deus ex machina dissolves as Shneiderman slips down into Davis’ arms, Cassandra once again, carried off from Troy as Agamemnon’s soldier’s pay.

Breaking up the vignettes, the three—Ragged Wing’s core group—lift up puppets, becoming the voices of a dithering chorus of townspeople, wondering what’s going on, trading gossip, reading the paper together, talking about the boss returning from the war—and “The Bitch” he’ll encounter.

In a way, the longer opening act, fluctuating between a touch of camp and many shades of grey, of reflection spoken out loud and the anguish of a love triangle acted out, is a springboard for the capper of the quick second act, the younger generation, Clytemnestra and Agamemnon’s brood: “Lectra, Shneiderman in shades and a mohawk, tagging her monicker on a screen; Davis as Orestes in Hawaiian shirt, shooting dice; Sass as a Rapunzelish Crysothemis, “the Other One,” a pregnant Pollyanna. The contrast works: Shneiderman from nurturing prophetess to brash iconoclast; Davis from stoic warrior to slacker son; Sass from femme fatale to ingenue.

If it sounds like cabaret-tragedy, in the same way much post-Sondheim musical theater could be called cabaret-musicals, there’s something to it. Tragedy itself was often deliberately anachronistic, resetting the myths in Athenian present time, for political-social effect. And tragedians after Euripides, himself only the third generation, began composing melodrama, which originally meant a greater emphasis on music and the swing of emotion associated with it, than the grand ambiguities of tragedy.

Much in the way of cultural attitude about myth—and fiction—seems to have developed in the wake of tragedy: Plato, a tragic poet-manqué, adopted in his dialogues an ironic, if not exactly skeptical, distance from myth that’s lasted as a mode in the arts and philosophy to the present day, source of both controversy and continuity.

Ragged Wing has produced a half dozen shows, distinguishing itself in two older pieces meant for physical theater, Richard Schechner’s The Serpent and Andre Gregory’s Alice in Wonderland—maybe best of all, directed by Sass and featuring a ubiquitous Davis and an elusive Shneiderman—and Davis’ staging of The Tempest, with an exceptional Amy Sass as Ariel.

All three bring their different sensibilities and a terrific sense of dedication, concentration and presence to So Many Ways to Kill a Man, the kind of collaborative show that could fulfill their talent as a troupe. Hopefully, they’ll continue to develop it further, as a work-in-progress. The necessary complications of the first act could be both smoothed and fleshed out. Psychologizing tragic figures—conjuring up motivation, neurosis, guilt from mythic directness and poetic ambiguity—can quickly slide into sentimental kitsch, a morass that Mourning Becomes Electra willingly indulged in (not without humor) and which Godard satirized in passing with Contempt. But Ragged Wing’s really onto something very theatrical in the fullest sense of the word, something they could take all the way, which seems to be what they’ve always been about.

They Left a Light, Susan Waterfall’s multimedia program of music composed in Nazi prison camps.

They Left a Light, Susan Waterfall’s multimedia program of music composed in Nazi prison camps, will be presented this Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the East Bay Jewish Community Center on Walnut in North Berkeley for the 25th annual Jewish Music Festival. including Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed in 1940 at a P.O.W. camp in Silesia, and rare selections of music composed by Jewish musicians at Terezin (Thereisenstadt) concentration camp north of Prague. This will be the second year Waterfall and the Mendocino Music Festival have collaborated with the Jewish Music Festival, after last year’s Degenerate Music, music of the Weimar Republic and German emigration, condemned by Hitler as “degenerate art.”

“I’ve wanted to play Quartet for the End of Time again—I played it with some of the same people in 1992 in Mendocino,” said Waterfall, “It’s so powerful, it takes people into an awareness of the eternal, which makes the music from Terezin more heartrending, knowing these people were denied even a normal lifespan.

“I didn’t know right away about Terezin, or in much detail about the camps. After what I’d been immersed in the previous year, I was asking what happened to Central European music, this incredible thread that was cut off and died in the camps. Janacek is one of my favorite composers; I wondered why he had no heirs. He had a lot of students—and they were Jews, in the eyes of the Nazis: Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa ... all strong Czech nationalists.”

The program will include rare cabaret pieces from Terezin, arranged by Julian Waterfall Pollack. Terezin had been a popular spa before the war; the Nazis concealed the desperate nature of the true life of the camp under a facade of a paradise for Jewish artists and intellectuals. Yet “it’s fantastic to see how music helped people to survive, to escape into it, to express revolt ... it was a way to restore dignity, to continue with the best part of their lives from before entering the camps.”

Photographs and drawings of the camps, the composers and original performers, as well as translations of the songs, will be projected during the performance.

Waterfall’s intensive research led her to other musicians and scholars around the world, including Bret Werb of the U.S. Holocast Museum in Washington, D.C.; Kobi Luria at the Beit Terezin (Terezin House) in Israel; Serge Dreznin, Paul Hamburg of the Judaic Library and Moshe Zoman. “I met some amazing people during the course of this.”

The music itself was hard to get: Waterfall spoke of two scores being “in thread form.”

Though “every story is devastatingly sad; you can’t take it all in—only by accretion,” there are unusual vignettes, like the friendship Messiaen developed with Albert Ruhl, an anti-Nazi guard who helped him get manuscripts and kept him from hard labor so he could write the Quartet; of Messiaen meeting two musicians who helped him, one an Algerian Jew from a military band, of listening to birdsong on night watch together—and of Bartok’s letter to Hitler, insisting Bartok be placed on the list of proscribed composers, as they were the most distinguished.

Waterfall’s programs are always in depth and intensive, with multimedia imagery that expands the effect of the music, consolidating its impact. Nonetheless, music is the thing, beginning with the Messiaen, inspired by his vision of the Angel of the Apocalypse from seeing the Aurora Borealis above the camp, music that Alex Ross in the New Yorker called “the most ethereally beautiful ... of the 20th century,” so transcendental yet forceful, at times a listener feels as if bodily lifted up.

“I’m moving my Bechstein into the JCC for this, for the Messiaen,” said Waterfall. “It’ll really be a treat.”

The program is dedicated to the memory of Max and Rosa Eichengruen, Walter Green’s paternal grandparents, who died at Terezin.

THEY LEFT A LIGHT

7:30 p.m. Sunday at the 25th annual Jewish Music Festival at the East Bay Jewish Community Center, 1414 Walnut. $20-$25. 848-0237. www.jewishmusicfestival.org.

Waking up in your own bed, but under the bare, spreading arms of a tree, to a bare-chested dancer and a chorus of singer-dancers could be an unnerving experience.

Or it could be, just as easily, an opening scene for the exploration of dance in an otherwise familiar environment, a setup borrowed and normalized, say, from Surrealism.

Or it could be a narrative hook familiar to movie audiences: images from dreamlife, from the subconscious, invading the space where the dreamer experiences them.

In any case, it could at least register as a disturbing experience, a kind of communality of internal and external lives.

This seems to be part of what Joe Goode and Holcombe Walter have in mind with their most recent experiment in musical theater, Dead Boys, at Zellerbach Playhouse on the UC campus, produced by the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (which, incidentally, has—as usual—a full season of worthy, sometimes unusual, programs).

Goode, a force for years in Bay Area performing arts, is on the faculty; others participating in various ways are in the department; Holcombe is a lecturer. Others, like lecturer Lura Dolas, who performs very well indeed as Anna the landlady for the young crew at the center of the story, are part of cast or production team.

Dead Boys meanders through a series of scenes with dance, song and dialogue, following the life and conflicted thoughts of Monroe (Daniel Duque-Estrada, with splendid presence), a gay artist working on a performance piece involving his claustrophobic dreams of gay people in trouble around the globe—and the romantic complications of his roomates, Carly and Brandon (Rachel Ferensowicz and Nicholas Trengove—a high point their dance piece on and around a couch, trying to either avoid each other or connect), and others, some appearing as chorus or ensemble, giving amplitude in one or several of the performing arts to the story and the multidisciplinary show: Danny Nguyen, Nyomi Stjepovic, Erica Freestone, Megan Lowe.

And Roberta, played with an offbeat comic awkwardness by Caitlin Marshall, who suddenly becomes the medium in an unnerving scene for her gay, gardener uncle who hanged himself, the most exceptional vignette of the evening.

There’s an urge, across the board, in the arts and outside them too, to put a story into everything, or everything in a story. A narrative urge in another art form shows an advanced or aging state of that form, opined Orson Welles.

Here, it shows an admirable stick-to-itiveness by Goode and Holcombe, though the frontal affectation of scene and tableau (maybe natural for many dance performances), the dialogue that is more expository than shared and much in content and situation made one spectator mutter, “Where’s Sondheim when we need him!” And indeed, the sense of ensemble, of a kind of domesticated cabaret of private versus public life reminds one of Company, updated—or a more engaged episode of Friends with song-and-dance.

Much of Goode’s most intriguing—most penetrating—work in the past has involved maybe two primary elements or modes, thrust up against or syncopated with each other—singing or instrumental playing and dance, for instance—suggesting or provoking stories almost casually, fleetingly ...

Dead Boys was worked up pretty quickly—though not all that quickly, considering the tradition of improvised shows. Still, the arch attitudinizing of dialogue and delivery, which have figured in other, more finished work by Goode and Holcombe, doesn’t do justice to what could be an interesting, engaging, even gripping tale, mostly effective in an organic sense only when it abandons the false naivete. The little moments, and some of the bigger issues in reflection, which must’ve inspired the piece, are what, dissociatively, remain with the viewer. And a fair amount of talented dancing and performance ability, including the excellent instrumental septet led by Holcombe.

DEAD BOYS

Presented by the UC Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday through Oct. 18 at Zellerbach Playhouse on the UC campus. $10-$15. 642-8827. tdps.berkeley.edu.

“Music has been really a part of my imagination since I was very young,” said Joana Carneiro. “When I was 9, I told my parents I wanted to be a conductor. And they thought it was absolutely the right idea. There was something attractive to me in the figure of the conductor. And on the Christmas after that, I was given my first baton!”

Carneiro, whose inaugural concert as Berkeley Symphony’s music director, succeeding Kent Nagano, will be tonight at 7 p. m. in Zellerbach Auditorium, spoke with pianist Sarah Cahill last Saturday afternoon at the Berkeley Public Library about her life, her music and what she hopes to accomplish during her tenure at the Symphony. Carneiro also discussed the pieces to be played tonight, two composed by Berkeley residents: John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances,” from Nixon In China; Gabriela Lena Frank’s Peregrinos, in its West Coast premiere; and Bela Bartok’s Concerto for Symphony Orchestra.

Carneiro spoke of what she considered her luck in being born when she was, in Portugal: “In 1976, it was a free country, after a long dictatorship. Not long before, women couldn’t vote; they couldn’t leave the country without their husbands’ authorization.” Her parents were not musicians, but decided all their children would learn music, truly a commitment, as the grammar schools taught music only to a few grades. Carneiro, the third of nine children (“A veritable orchestra!” commented Sarah Cahill) who all went to conservatory, started with violin at 8.

Asked what she would be doing if she hadn’t become a conductor, Carneiro said, “A doctor, for sure!” She studied medicine in Portugal. “That kind of thinking is close to music; memorizing structure, for example. I don’t remember anything, but I miss it very much!”

(That training and its subsequent analogue in studying musical texts in preparing for concert perhaps accounts somewhat for Carneiro’s coherence in speaking, her ability to communicate with orchestra and audience, as well as individuals.)

Again, Carneiro cited her luck at being able to take a course in conducting, leading to her career.

Carneiro has both studied music and conducted extensively in America; in particular, she cites her time as assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, thinking of herself as “coming from that tradition” and speaking of L.A. Philharmonic music director Esa-Pekka Salonen as “very much my mentor.” Her experiences in Los Angeles clearly provided something of a nexus for her career: the feeling for “investing in new voices”; her first meetings with composers Gabriela Lena Frank (just named Creative Advisor to the Symphony) and Steven Stuckey (who she also referred to as a mentor, both for herself and for composers in Berkeley Symphony’s Under Construction development program), as well as the opportunity to work with their music—and the chance to work in opera.

“One day Esa-Pekka asked me, ‘Do you speak French?’ When I said yes, he said he’d be premiering a new opera; would I like to be his assistant?” Carneiro mentioned she’d sung in choir when young, but had no operatic training. Her first work in opera resulted in her acquaintance with stage director Peter Sellars, who introduced her to John Adams. She assisted Adams with his opera The Flowering Tree in Vienna, later conducting it in Chicago and Paris—and in March in Cincinnati. “Opera is where I learn the most; it’s the mostcomplex form. Dance, opera ... there’s something very organic about this music. Stravinsky’s Firebird [which she’ll conduct here later this season] is one of the pieces I conduct the most. Dealing with these connections: gesture and music, how music mimics verbal experience, phrasing in melody ... I’ve only conducted 21st-century operas! The first time I’ll conduct a 20th-century opera will be Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, later this season.”

While in Los Angeles, Carneiro withdrew from auditioning. “I wanted to go back home more; I thought it was not the time to have my own orchestra, especially on the West Coast—and look what happened! I took a year to think about it. Then I heard that Kent was leaving Berkeley—and everyone around me said, that’s it! The orchestra you’ve been waiting for.”

Coming to Berkeley was in some ways like a homecoming: there were musicians she’d worked with. “I didn’t know I knew them until I came here! When I arrived for the Under Construction reading of new pieces, I saw at least five musicians I worked with before, including Franklyn [D’Amato] the concertmaster, from L.A. or Santa Rosa [where she’d served as guest conductor]—and a composer I knew in Portugal.” Thinking of Berkeley, it had “the talent, intellectual community, the amount of freedom ... so crazy ideas actually happen. Five living composers are coming this season, in only four subscription concerts. Kent and the Berkeley Symphony are really responsible for that way of thinking, that tradition. In the context of this season, Bartok and Stravinsky seem like the old people. Around the world, many think of them as new. When I think of Berkeley, I think of no limits artistically. How many inaugural concerts have nothing written before 1940?”

Asked by Cahill what she says to listeners who say they don’t care for contemporary music, Carneiro said, “There’s such a huge spectrum, I hope there’s enough variety in our programming of great contemporary music that one piece will move them. I want to show that beautiful music is being created today—beautiful like Beethoven’s music is beautiful.”

Carneiro spoke of her growing friendship with Frank, a Berkeley native, and commented on the Bartok concerto: “He really wanted to emphasize each instrument ... The melody will be shared, one instrument starts, another repeats, showing the beauty of the timbre of each ... It’s a way of celebrating the orchestra, the individuals and the whole ... with the dark sounds of Bartok.”

Of her life and career so far, Carneiro said, “It’s sort of a romantic story, but true. Maybe it was this musical experience that liberated me to be entirely who I am.”

Angela Dean-Barham, who sang a distinguished Betty Shabazz in Anthony Davis’ opera X, about Malcolm X, a few years back at Oakland Metro Opera Theatre, will perform her absorbing solo show, The Unsung Diva : The Life and Times of Siserietta Jones, aka The Black Patti, relating the life and singing song excerpts from the career of the African-American opera star of the Gilded Age, for the 80th anniversary celebration of the Belluevue Club on Lake Merritt in Oakland, this Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m., with dinner and cocktails to follow. $12 members, $14 general for show; $30 buffet and show. 451-1000 or reception@bellevueclub.org

Sonic Harvest ’09, previously known as Harvest of Song, will celebrate their ninth season this Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with Allen Shearer’s “brief but droll opera,” A Very Large Mole, featuring Claudia Stevens’ libretto after Kafka, conducted by Jonathan Khuner; the premiere of Peter Josheff’s Caught Between Two Worlds; three poems by Dorothy Cary; excerpts from a new opera by Ann Callaway; and music by Herb Bielawa and Mark Secosh, played by musicians including Tod Brody on flute, Mark Teicholz on guitar; Jerry Kuderna on piano—and many others. Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St. $15-$20; 654-8651. http://sonicharvest.org.

Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin (1828-1909) was one of California’s most storied individuals. Crossing the plains by wagon train in 1853, Baldwin quickly made his name as a shrewd entrepreneur. By his early 40s, he had become a fabled Comstock millionaire. In the mid-1870s, he opened San Francisco’s legendary Baldwin Hotel and Theatre on the corner of Market and Powell Streets, current site of the Flood Building.

Baldwin was America’s most celebrated horseman. He owned nine derby winners, four of them raised in his stables. Between 1875 and 1880, he acquired over 35,000 acres of Southern California ranches, including Rancho Santa Anita, his home ranch. Combined with properties in San Francisco and Los Angeles, these holdings made Baldwin one of the foremost landowners in the state.

On Rancho Santa Anita, Baldwin raised 33,000 sheep, 3,000 head of cattle, 500 horses, many hogs and dairy cows. His vineyards yielded 384,000 gallons of wine and 55,000 gallons of brandy. The orchards included 500 acres of orange trees and 3,000 walnut trees. The nursery comprised one million fledgling trees.

Married four times and involved in many tempestuous love affairs, Baldwin fathered two legitimate daughters, born almost 30 years apart. The younger, Anita (1876-1939), was born to his third wife, Jane Virginia Dexter, a child-bride who died in 1881.

Like her father, Anita was impetuous in love. On Jan. 5, 1892, five days shy of her 16th birthday, she secretly married George W. Baldwin on a tugboat outside the Golden Gate. The 25-year-old groom was her father’s cousin, employed as a clerk at the Baldwin Hotel. On March 21, while Lucky Baldwin was away at the Santa Anita ranch, the young couple went to Shasta on their honeymoon. The news traveled like wildfire across the nation, and the papers had a field day with headlines such as “Love Laughs at Luck” (St. Paul Daily Globe) and “Lucky Baldwin’s Daughter Anita Mated Against His Wishes” (New York Times).

A week later, the radiant couple returned home—not to the Baldwin Hotel, where the bride’s family lived, but to rooms in the home of a “private family” on McAllister Street, near San Francisco’s new City Hall, where the groom had secured employment in the county clerk’s office. George expressed confidence in his ability to provide for his wife, while the San Francisco Call speculated on the prospect of her father’s forgiveness: “It is thought a reconciliation will follow in time, although it will hardly be immediate. Mr. Baldwin is a man of strong resolutions, but his most vulnerable part is said to be his affection for the youngest daughter.”

The reconciliation was not long in coming. On April 13, the San Francisco Call announced, “The old millionaire fell ill several days ago, and when the girl learned that he was sick she went to his bedside to wait upon him as she used to. The reconciliation between them is said to be complete, and the old man will also forgive George for carrying off his favorite.”

The couple moved back into the hotel, where George was again employed. In June 1893, Anita delivered twin boys who died shortly after their birth. Lucky Baldwin had predicted that the marriage would not last a year. It went on for several more but was rocky from the start.

The Baldwin Hotel was destroyed by fire on Nov. 23, 1898. By then, the thrifty George had accumulated enough savings to purchase a string of racehorses, which he took to the East Coast on Jan. 1, 1899. Although George eventually came back to San Francisco, he showed no desire to return to the conjugal home. Anita divorced him in October 1900 on grounds of desertion.

No sooner was she free of one marital entanglement than she fell into another. Her new innamorato aroused Lucky Baldwin’s ire just as fiercely as the previous one, since this time Anita committed the sin of falling in love with a Democrat.

She met Hull McClaughry (born 1870), a Harvard Law School graduate and politician, during the 1898 election campaign. “It was no uncommon sight to see Mrs. George W. Baldwin an interested spectator at all the Democratic meetings at which McClaughry spoke in the interest of the party at large and incidentally for himself as a candidate for the office of Justice of the Peace, a stepping stone to possible future political honors,” reported the San Francisco Call.

Anita went so far as to attempt a conversion of her father to the cause, showing him Hull McClaughry’s campaign poster and asking for his support. A staunch Republican, old Baldwin was outraged. Relating the incident to his cronies, he summed up, “Well, I just tore that picture in small bits and gave her to understand that I did not want any Democratic ads around where I was and what’s more made it plain to her that she had better overlook the original, too, or there’d be something doing.”

The daughter promised to obey. In May 1900, her father traveled to the gold fields of Nome, Alaska, determined to recoup the millions he lost in the Baldwin Hotel fire. For the second time, Anita took advantage of his absence to elope. Remembering the seasickness of her 1892 tugboat wedding, she vetoed a floating venue for this round. The couple traveled by train to Carson City, Nevada, where a Justice of the Peace married them on Oct. 26—exactly 20 days after Anita’s divorce from George.

The new bridegroom practiced law and eventually found some favor with his father-in-law, for in July 1903, when Lucky created the town of Arcadia on the Santa Anita tract, McClaughry was one of the five insiders elected to the town’s first Board of Trustees.

The McClaughrys’ first child, Dextra, was born in San Francisco in 1901. Their second, Baldwin, was born in Berkeley in 1904. They were not listed in the city directory until 1908, when their home was an undistinguished Colonial Revival box at 2401 Ward St.

In January 1904, Hull McClaughry was offered the post of secretary to San Francisco Postmaster Arthur G. Fisk. By mid-March, he had become General Superintendent, and in January 1905 attained the office of Assistant Postmaster, a position he held until 1910. This post had previously been held by President McKinley’s aged uncle, who accepted a subordinate position in the money-order department to make way for McClaughry. Fisk clearly favored McClaughry, for they went on to become law partners.

By 1908, it was time to seek a more fashionable address, and the McClaughrys hired contractor John Armstrong to build them a two-story house at 17 Plaza Drive, in the new Claremont tract. The cost, $3,650, was very modest for the home of a millionaire’s daughter.

Lucky Baldwin died on March 1, 1909, leaving an estate of over $20 million. Anita inherited half of it, including the Santa Anita ranch. As a result, the McClaughrys began spending much of their time in Arcadia, where Hull managed the estate.

Still, this marriage, too, foundered. In July 1913, Anita filed for divorce on grounds of cruelty. “She testified that she and her husband quarreled so often over the cost of living as a result of his economical ideas that her health became impaired,” reported the New York Times. She undertook to pay Hull $300,000 as part of the divorce settlement.

Celebrating her freedom from economy, Anita proceeded to a San Francisco jeweler, dropping close to $225,000 on a string of pearls. Having yielded the estate management to Arthur Fisk, The frugal Hull McClaughry kept the house on Plaza Drive for several years before returning to his hometown, Galt, Calif. His ex-wife and children quickly dropped his surname, reverting to Baldwin. Both Dextra and Baldwin faithfully followed in the footsteps of their mother and grandfather, marrying by elopement.

LeConte Neighborhood Assoc. meets to discuss the crime report and and several major property developments in the area, at 7:30 p.m. at LeConte School. KarlReeh@gmail.com

Berkeley School Volunteers New Volunteer Orientation from noon to 1 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Bring a photo ID and two references to the orientation. Returning volunteers do not need to attend. For further information 644-8833.

“Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country” with earhtquake engineers Peter Yanev and Andrew Thompson at 7:30 p.m. at Builders Booksource on Fourth St. 845-7051.

“The New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement,” with author Amy Dean, at 12:30 p.m. at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, IRLE Building, 2521 Channing Way. 642-9187.

Traditional Farming with Native Farmers from New Mexico A presentation and discussion on farming self-sufficiency at 6:30 p.m. at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Cost is $5$50 sliding scale. 548-2220, ext. 233.

“Demolition of Berkeley’s Bevatron and its Radioactive Waste” A report by LA Wood and others at 7 p.m. at BFUU, 1924 Cedar at Bonita. Donations welcome.

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055.

FRIDAY, OCT. 16

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Nancy Scheper-Hughes PhD on “The Shockng Story of Illegal Human Organ Trafficking” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 527-2173. www.citycommonsclub.org

Say No to War! Bring Our Troops Home Now Rally from 2 to 3 p.m. at the corner of Action and University.

Shimmy Shimmy Kids Dance A ‘60s-style event for the whole family at 7 p.. at Rhythmix Cultural Works, 2513 Blanding Ave., Alameda. Tickets are $10 for adults, $5 for age 2 and older, 2 and under, free. 865-5060. www.rhythmix.org

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

Stand With Us Stand for Peace Stand with Israel vigil every Friday from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. www.sfvoiceforisrael.org

Berkeley Historical Society Walk “The Obscure History of South Telegraph” A block-by-block stroll down one of Berkeley's oldest streets and into the adjacent neighborhoods, led by Steve Finacom, from 10 a.m. to noon. Cost is $8-$10. For reservations and starting point, call 848-0181.

Berkeley Path Wanderers Panoramic Hill Walk An insider’s look at this neighborhood of steep steps and hills, overlooking the city. Meet at 10 a.m. at the foot of Panoramic Place at the south end of the footbal stadium Parking is difficult. 520-3876. www.berkeleypaths.org

Hike for Toddlers and Friends to explore the meadows, ponds and trails of Tilden. Meet at 2:30 p.m. at Tilden Nature Center. 544-2233.

Loma Prieta Twenty Years Later with an exhibit and speakers, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Oakland Main Library, 125 14th St., Oakland.

Creative Personal Statement Writing Workshop for teens writing their college application essays, from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library, 2940 Benvenue. A free event sponsored by ecBerkeley.org. 266-2069.

Wheels for Meals Ride Benefit ride through Livermore Valley for Alameda County Meals on Wheels. Ride lengths are 15, 35, or 65 miles. For information see www.wheelsformealsride.com

Lakeshore Neighborhood Plant Exchange Come trade your excess with others, from noon to 4 p.m. at 3811 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland. All types and sizes of plants are welcome. For information see www.plantexchange.wordpress.com

Greening El Cerrito Day with tree planting in the morning followed by a showcase with educational displays, children’s activities and music from noon to 2 p.m. at City Hall Plaza, 10890 San Pablo Ave.

Walking Tour of Old Oakland “New Era/New Politics” highlights African-American leaders who have made their mark on Oakland. Meet at 10 a.m. at the African American Museum and Library at 659 14th St. 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Live Owl Program from 1 to 4 p.m. at RabbitEars, 377 Colusa Ave., Kensington. 525-6155.

“Exploring De Staebler Through Movement” A movement workshop with Muriel Maffre in conjunction with the exhibition “Steven De Staebler: The Sculptor’s Way” at 11 a.m. at The Richmond Art Center, 2540 Bartlett Ave., Richmond. Free. 620-6772. www.therac.org

El Cerrito Democratic Club Annual Dinner at 6 p.m. on Sat the Arlington Community Church, 52 Arlington Ave., Kensington, with Jenn Pae of PowerPac, on “Is the Honeymoon Over? A Young Obama Delegate Looks Back—and Ahead.” Cost is $30-$35 for adults, $10-$15 for children. 526-4874. www.ecdclub.org

Home Movie Day from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive. Film inspection and check in at 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Cost is $5.50-$9.50. 642-0808. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174. .

SUNDAY, OCT. 18

“Berkeley in Conflict: Eyewitness Images” featuring never- exhibited works by photographers John Jekabson, Dan Beaver, and Lydia Gans. Reception at 3 p.m. at the Berkeley History Center, 1931 Center St. 848-0181.

Grass Roots House Open House with presentations, historical material, food and music from 3 to 6 p.m. at 2022 Blake St. Suggested donation $5-$25, no one turned away.

“Water Fair” with information on home and garden, political action and personal responsibility, and the global problems affecting water availability and fair distribution at noon at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. www.stjohnsberkeley.org

Over the Hills Gang Hikers 55 years and older explore Briones from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. For details call 544-2233.

Bat Show by the Bat Conservation Fund Information on Bat conservation and the usefulness of bats in our ecosystems at 7 p.m. at the Kensington Community Center, 59 Arlington Ave., Kensington. Free, but tickets required. Tickets are available at the Kensington Library. For ages 5 and up. 524-3043.

Tuesdays for the Birds Tranquil bird walks in local parklands, led by Bethany Facendini, from 7 to 9:30 a.m. Today we will visit Garretson Point, Martin Luther King Jr. Regional Shoreline Bring water, field guides, binoculars or scopes. Call for meeting place and if you need to borrow binoculars. 544-2233.

“Afghanistan” A film by Robert Greenwald at 7:30 p.m. at Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Unversalists, 1924 Cedar St. 841-4824. www.bfuu.org

Health, Wellness and Cancer Awareness Fair with workshops, and information, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Peralta Community College District Main Office, Atrium & Boardroom, 333 East 8th St., Oakland. Free

Berkeley School Volunteers New Volunteer Orientation from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. at 1835 Allston Way. Bring a photo ID and two references to the orientation. Returning volunteers do not need to attend. For further information 644-8833.

Berkeley Garden Club with Gary Bogue, gardening and wildlife columnist on “Gardening with Wildlife” at 2 p.m. at Epworth United Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. Free. 526-1083. www.BerkeleyGardenClub.org

“Adventures on the Bay Area Ridge Trail” with Morris Older at 7 p.m. at REI, 1338 San Pablo Ave. 527-4140.

Genealogy Workshop with Jane Knowles Lindsey, President of the California Genealogical Society who will instruct individuals on how to research and start a genealogical program at 3 p.m. at Salem Lutheran Home, 2361 East 29th St., Oakland. Free. 534-3637. www.salemlutheranhome.org

Pacific Boychoir Academy Day School Admissions Open House at 6:30 p.m. at 2401 Le Conte Ave. 849-8180

“What Peace Means to Me” Create collaborative works in performance, song, poetry, photography or video at from 3 to 5 p.m. at Unity of Berkeley, 2401 Le Conte Ave.. RSVP to 302-8734.

Tuesday Tilden Walkers Join a few slowpoke seniors at 9:30 a.m. in the parking lot near the Little Farm for an hour or two walk. 215-7672, 524-9992.

End the Occupation Vigil every Tues. at noon at Oakland Federal Bldg., 1301 Clay St. www.epicalc.org

Homework Help at the Albany Library for students in grades 2 - 6, Tues. and Thurs. from 3:15 to 5:15 p.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. Emphasis on math and writing skills. No registration is required. For more information, call 526-3720.

Homework Help Program at the Richmond Public Library Tues. and Thurs. from 3 to 5:30 p.m. at 325 Civic Center Plaza. For more information or to enroll, call 620-6557.

Street Level Cycles Community Bike Program Come use our tools as well as receive help with performing repairs free of charge. Youth classes available. Tues., Thurs., Sat. and Sun. from 2 to 6 p.m. at at 84 Bolivar Dr., Aquatic Park. 644-2577. www.watersideworkshops.org

Berkeley Camera Club meets at 7:30 p.m., at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. 548-3991. www.berkeleycameraclub.org

Bridge for beginners from 12:30 to 2:15 p.m., all others 12:30 to 4 p.m. Sing-A-Long at 2:30 p.m. at the North Berkeley Senior Center. 981-5190.

St. John’s Prime Timers meets at 9:30 a.m. at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. We offer ongoing classes in exercise and creative arts, and always welcome new members over 50. 845-6830.

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 21

Tilden Explorers An after-school nature adventure program for 5-7 year olds. We will have a Nature Treasure Hunt. from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m.. Cost is $6-$8, registration required. 1-888-EBPARKS.

Berkeley Retired Teachers Association General Meeting at 12:30 p.m. at the Northbrae Community Church, 941 The Alameda. David Walrath, Legislative Advocate for California Retired Teachers will speak on “Challenges and Opportunities for Retirees in 2010.”

“A New Deal for the East Bay: Excavating the Buried Civilization of the Great Depression” with Gray Brechin at 7:30 at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St Tickets are $15, $40 for the series. 644-9344. berkeleyheritage.com

Albany Reads “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” Book discussion at 7 p.m. in the Edith Stone Room of the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720 ext. 5.

“Holes in Heaven” a documentary on the High Frequency Active Auroral Reseach Program managed by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, at 7:30 p.m. at Humanist Hall, 390 27th St., Oakland. Donation $5. www.Humanist Hall.org

Family Sing-along for young children and their families at 5 p.m. at Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave., Albany. 526-3720.

Conference on Afghan and Iranian Diaspora Cultures and Communities in the Bay Area with presentations, discussions, film screening, art exhibition, poetry and dance performance, Thurs. from 5 to 7 p.m. and all day Sat. and Sun. at California State University, East Bay, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd., Hayward. Cost is $35- $50. http://class.csueastbay.edu/Global_Knowledge.php

Home Energy Improvements Workshop Learn how you can save energy and money, improve indoor air quality and take advantage of incentives and rebates, at 7 p.m. at Epworth Unified Methodist Church, 1953 Hopkins St. For information call 981-7473.

Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum for innovation in the semiconductor industry at 6:30 p.m. in Andersen Auditorium, Haas School of Business, UC campus.

National Day of Protest to Stop Police Brutality at noon at Oakland City Hall Plaza, 14th & Broadway

Circle of Concern Vigil meets on West Lawn of UC campus across from Addison and Oxford, Thurs. at noon and Sun. at 1 p.m. to oppose UC weapons labs contracts. 848-8055.

FRIDAY, OCT. 23

City Commons Club Noon Luncheon with Dr. Joel Parrott, Exec. Dir. of the Oakland Zoo, on “The History and Future of the Oakland Zoo” Luncheon at 11:45 a.m. for $15, speech at 12:30 p.m., at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant St. For information and reservations call 527-2173. www.citycommonsclub.org

Berkeley Women in Black weekly vigil from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. Our focus is human rights in Palestine. 548-6310.

Stand With Us Stand for Peace Stand with Israel vigil every Friday from noon to 1 p.m. at Bancroft and Telegraph. www.sfvoiceforisrael.org

SATURDAY, OCT. 24

Out of the Darkness Walk A benefit for the American Society for Suicide Prevention at 6 a.m. at The Colonnades, at Lake Merritt. You do not have to fundraise to walk, and any size donation helps. For information email OaklandWalk@aol.com

Help Restore Cerrito Creek at the foot of Albany Hill. Meet at 10 a.m. at Creekside Park, south end of Santa Clara Ave., El Cerrito. Wear closed-toed shoes with good traction and clothes that can get dirty. All ages welcome, snacks, tools, and gloves provided. 848 9358. www.fivecreeks.org

Project Peace East Bay’s Day of Peace from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Volunteers at Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Ave., in Oakland, and Berkeley’s Leconte Elementary School, 2241 Russell St. will help each school with various building and grounds projects. Those who wish to volunteer may register at www.projectpeaceeastbay.org

Haunted House and Family Pre-Halloween Party for all ages with adjustable scariness, from 6:30 to 8:15 p.m. at , St. John's Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave. Wear costumes. 845-6830 ext 13.

Halloween Spook-tacular Music and party with games, Haunted Parlor and fun for the whole family, at 6:3 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church of Alamda, 2001 Santa Clara at Chestnut, Alameda. Free, donations acepted. 522-1477.

Fall Storytime for preschool children and thier families at 11 a.m. at the Albany Library, 1247 Marin Ave. 526-3720.

Superheroes and Mythical Monsters Make a cape and mask from 1 to 3 p.m. at Museum of Children’s Art, 538 9th St., Oakland. Cost is $7 per child, $3 per adult. 465-8770.

Music Business Seminar sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts, 6601 Shellmound St. Cost is $25-$70. 415-775-7200. www.calawyersforthearts.org

South Berkeley Clinic Acupuncture Day from 8 a.m. to noon at 2880 Sacramento St.

Walking Tour of Jack London Waterfront Meet at 10 a.m. at the corner of Broadway and Embarcadero. Tour lasts 90 minutes. Reservations can be made by calling 238-3234. www.oaklandnet.com/walkingtours

Lawn Bowling on the green at the corner of Acton St. and Bancroft Way every Wed. and Sat. at 10 a.m. for ages 12 and up. Wear flat soled shoes, no heels. Free lessons. 841-2174.

SUNDAY, OCT. 25

Free/Low-Cost Animal Care including vaccines for dogs and cats, rabies vaccines, microchipping, dog licensing, and spay/neuter vouchers, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Berkeley Animal Care Services, 2013 Second St., cross street Addison. Dogs need to be on a leash; puppies and cats in a carrier. No-one turned away for lack of funds. 981-6603.

Community Music Day with Instrument Petting Zoo, class demonstrations, performances, food and prizes from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Crowden Music Center, 1475 Rose St. 559-6910. info@crowden.org

Haunted Caves of the Environmental Education Center with crafts, refreshments and Halloween Lore. For ages 6 and up from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at Tilden NAture Center, Tilden Park. Cost is $4. 544-2233.

Pumpkin Mania Come and carve pumpkins and make your own mask from 1 to 5 p.m. at Expressions Gallery, 2035 Ashby Ave. 644-4930.

Tour of the Berkeley City Club, the “little castle” designed by Julia Morgan from 1 to 4 p.m. at 2315 Durant Ave. 848-7800.

Free Sailboat Rides from 1 to 4 p.m. at the Cal Sailing Club, Berkeley Marina. Wear warm, waterproof clothing and bring a change of clothes in case you get wet. Children 5 and over welcome with parent or guardian. www.cal-sailing.org